Category: Venture Capital

WalkMe Delivers GPS For Web-Based Applications To Enhance User Experience

WalkMe, a cloud-based platform that brands itself as the equivalent of a GPS for users of a SaaS applications, was recently named winner of Silicon Valley’s Tie50 Award. Selected from over 2500 companies worldwide for the award, WalkMe’s success at the Tie50 competition for top startups comes soon after the finalization of $11M in funding in a round led by Scale Venture Partners that brings the total capital raised by the company to $17.5M. WalkMe simplifies online user experiences by providing users of web-based applications with guidance regarding the completion of a task of interest. For example, if a user of an online banking website wished to create an automated transfer of funds from one account to another but were unsure of the online process for doing so, they could use WalkMe’s proprietary technology to obtain direction about the set of screens to navigate as illustrated below:

WalkMe allows users to type in free text questions to user experience navigation questions and subsequently receive click by click instructions about the optimal online path to complete the task described in their question. Easily installed by means of the addition of a line of code to the backend of the application in question, the WalkMe Enterprise Class Guidance and Engagement Platform enhances user experiences and contributes to customer retention, particularly with respect to online experiences in verticals such as online retail and travel-related websites where consumers often spend seconds before deciding whether to navigate to a new website. That said, the WalkMe platform can be used to enhance user experience in any web-based application and subsequently give vendors an advantage over competitors because of the streamlined user experience and increased satisfaction enjoyed by its users. With customers such as Adobe, Amazon Web Services, Bank of Montreal and Citrix, WalkMe stands well positioned to disrupt the user interaction space by transforming the way users obtain information from web-based technologies. Expect more details about the technology undergirding its platform to emerge in upcoming months as the company gains more traction and rolls out upgrades to its platform.

Concurrent Inc. Finalizes $10M In Series B Funding To Facilitate Use of Big Data

Concurrent Inc. today announces the finalization of $10M in Series B funding in a round led by new investor Bain Capital Ventures, with additional participation from existing investors Rembrandt Ventures and True Ventures. Salil Deshpande, Managing Director of Bain Capital Ventures, will join Concurrent Inc.’s board of directors as a result of today’s funding raise. The funding will be used to accelerate the development of Concurrent’s commercial product Driven as well as Cascading, the framework for developing and managing Big Data applications. Driven fills a critical void within the Big Data industry by providing customers with visibility regarding application performance on Hadoop while Cascading represents one of the most widely used frameworks for application development on Hadoop. Concurrent’s Series B funding raise comes hot on the heels of its elaboration of details regarding Cascading 3.0 and the announcement of partnerships with Hadoop vendor Hortonworks and Databricks. Scheduled for release in the early summer, Cascading 3.0 features support for technology platforms and computational frameworks such as local in-memory, Apache MapReduce and Apache Tez. Meanwhile, Cascading’s partnership with Hortonworks integrates the Cascading SDK into the Hortonworks Data Platform under the terms of an agreement whereby Hortonworks will certify, deliver and support the Cascading framework. Today’s funding raise provides further validation of Concurrent’s business model and empowers it to consolidate its early positioning as a leader in the Big Data space, with specializations in applications that streamline and simplify Hadoop application development and cluster management. With its new round of funding in hand, the industry expect Concurrent Inc. to obtain more traction around its flagship product Driven as it continues to innovate at the forefront of technology platforms that facilitate the effective operationalization of Big Data. Today’s Series B announcement brings the total capital raised by Concurrent Inc. to $14M by building upon a March 2013 Series A round of $4M.

Trifacta Raises $25M For Big Data Transformation Platform That Enhances Analyst Productivity

Trifacta, the data transformation company, today announced the finalization of $25M in Series C funding. The funding round was led by a new investor, Ignition Partners, with additional participation from existing investors Greylock Partners and Accel Partners. As a result of the investment, Frank Artale, Managing Director of Ignition Partners, will join the Trifacta board of directors. The Trifacta Data Transformation Platform enhances the productivity of data analysts and scientists by transforming Big Data into a structure that renders it easier to analyze, visualize and manipulate. The Trifacta platform’s predictive interaction technology allows users to visualize Big Data, interact with different data visualizations and take advantage of machine-learning based predictions regarding data transformations and analytics of interest. The platform aims to deliver transparency regarding the data in question, agility with respect to the user’s ability to interact with Big Data, predictive intelligence based on machine learning about the efficacy of user interactions with data and scalability marked by the ability to interact with large, heterogeneous datasets. As told to Cloud Computing Today by Trifacta CEO Joe Hellerstein, Trifacta customers can take advantage of the platform’s ability to cleanse and organize Big Data in conjunction with other enterprise software platforms such as SAS, for example. That said, Trifacta itself offers its own universe of tools for facilitating insights with respect to Big Data and, unlike many business intelligence or analytics platforms, is designed specifically for the purpose of transformation, data discovery and visualization of massive datasets. Today’s announcement about Trifacta’s Series C funding comes hot on the heels of a March 2014 partnership with Cloudera to jointly deliver the Trifacta Data Transformation platform in conjunction with Cloudera’s Hadoop distribution. To date, Trifacta has raised a total of approximately $45M in funding. Given partnerships such as Cloudera in hand, and $25M in Series C funding that comes roughly 6 months after its Series B capital raise of $12M, the industry should expect Trifacta’s traction amongst Big Data customers to skyrocket as news about its ability to transform Big Data into a usable form that accelerates the development of actionable business intelligence proliferates.

Metacloud Raises $15M In Series B Funding For OpenStack-Based Private Cloud Solutions

Metacloud recently announced the finalization of $15M in Series B funding in a round led by Pelion Venture Partners, Silicon Valley Bank, and UMC Capital, with additional participation from existing investors AME Cloud Ventures, Canaan Partners, and Storm Ventures. The funding will be used to accelerate the company’s product development as well as to expand its team. Currently, Metacloud offers two OpenStack-based private cloud products in the form of Metacloud OnPrem and Metacloud Hosted. Metacloud OnPrem represents an enterprise-grade on premise private cloud solution whereas Metacloud Hosted constitutes a private cloud solution hosted by Metacloud that absolves customers of the hassles of maintaining a datacenter. The Series B funding testifies to Metacloud’s increasing traction in the commercial OpenStack space and the conviction of its investors that it can carve out a niche in the highly competitive, OpenStack-based private cloud market. Metacloud’s total funding now stands at $27M.

PepperData Raises $5M For Enhanced Application Performance On Hadoop

PepperData, a San Francisco-based Big Data startup, recently announced the finalization of $5M in Series A funding in a round led Signia Venture Partners and the Webb Investment Network. The funding will be used to accelerate the company’s product development as well as to expand its sales and marketing operations. Led by former executives from Microsoft and Yahoo, PepperData specializes in enhancing the ability of Hadoop clusters to run multiple applications concurrently. The PepperData platform addresses the problem whereby Hadoop clusters that contain more than one application run the risk of allowing one job or application to monopolize the cluster. PepperData’s technology optimizes application performance within a Hadoop cluster by monitoring resource usage across applications and recalibrating resource allocations to ensure that jobs complete in a timely fashion. As such, PepperData enables more effective utilization of resources, enhanced performance for Hadoop-based applications and increased visibility regarding application performance in a Hadoop cluster.

Marketing Automation Vendor Act-On Raises $42M Just Days After IBM’s Agreement To Acquire Silverpop

Marketing automation vendor Act-On Software today announced the finalization of $42 million in venture financing in a round led by Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV) with additional participation from Norwest Venture Partners, Trinity Ventures, US Venture Partners, and Voyager Capital. As a result of the funding raise, David Yuan, general partner at TCV, joins Act-On’s board of directors. Act-On intends to use the funding for all aspects of its business operations, including product development, sales, marketing and operations. The announcement of Act-On’s funding raise comes in the wake of IBM’s announcement of its agreement to acquire marketing automation firm Silverpop on April 10.

IBM’s acquisition of Silverpop for an undisclosed sum builds upon Oracle’s acquisition of Eloqua and Responsys, Salesforce.com’s acquisition of ExactTarget and Marketo’s IPO in May 2013. Silverpop specializes in the personalization of marketing content based on the creation of customized audience profiles derived from email, social media and web and mobile activity and boasts 8000 customers in over 50 countries including the likes of Mazda, Stonyfield Farm and Advanced Micro Devices. Atri Chatterjee, CMO of Act-On, commented on the significance of IBM’s acquisition of Silverpop as follows:

The marketing automation industry has been heating up and Act-On is playing in one of the hottest markets right now…IBM acquiring Silverpop further validates the rapidly growing market and substantiates the industry as a whole. We are seeing an increasingly growing demand for marketing automation as companies are doing more online multi-channel marketing and moving beyond email. Corporate Darwinism is at work here in a fast evolving market. The companies that remain standing are the hyper-growth ones with leading edge technology, or the behemoths that are scrambling to enter the market.

Here, Chatterjee notes that the marketing automation landscape is rapidly bifurcating into two spaces marked by “behemoths” like IBM and Oracle that elected to scoop up attractive platforms such as Silverpop, and a selection of standalone vendors that differentiate themselves by consistently demonstrating their ability to innovate and respond nimbly to customer needs and the changing technology horizon in which all marketing vendors operate. Act-On definitively stands in the category of the “hyper-growth” vendors “with leading edge technology” as evinced by its growth to over 2000 customers and accolades such as the designation of leader in the Forrester Wave report on lead-to-revenue management platform vendors for Q1 of 2014. Today’s funding raise brings the total capital raised by Act-On to $74 million since it was founded in 2008. Act-On now has the luxury of innovating upon its integrated marketing platform to develop more accurate analytics and predictive modeling algorithms to drive the personalization of marketing content at both a population and individual customer level. Key challenges for the Beaverton, Oregon-based company will involve the platform’s ability to incorporate real-time analytics into its prescriptive marketing campaigns, the refinement of customer profiles as they evolve in the specific context of the customer’s relationship with specific brands and the ability to generate effective outbound content such as text messages that match the needs and predispositions of targeted consumers. With an extra $42 million in cash in hand, however, Act-On may well end up becoming one of the vendors scooped up by the “behemoths which are scrambling to enter the market,” particularly if it can consolidate its impressive traction to date and enhance its platform to the point where it becomes the undisputed leader in the marketing automation space.