6 key metrics that can help SaaS startups outlast this downturn

With the economy slowing and businesses tightening their belts, the coming months will be make or break for many startups. Business is shifting from a “growth at all costs” mindset to one that is more measured. This means leaders need to know where to conserve cash, where to target spen

Dataloop secures cash infusion to expand its data annotation tool set

Data annotation, or the process of adding labels to images, text, audio and other forms of sample data, is typically a key step in developing AI systems. The vast majority of systems learn to make predictions by associating labels with specific data samples, like the caption “bear” with

Craft Ventures leads $11.5M into meez's culinary recipe tool

Restaurant kitchens across the country are trying to manage customers while also managing labor shortages. This means it's important to get new employees up and running faster. Josh Sharkey, chef, founder and CEO of meez, a recipe management app for chefs, started the company in 2020 so that fo

Y42 wants to become mission control for your data pipelines

When Berlin-based Y42 launched in 2020, its focus was mostly on orchestrating data pipelines for business intelligence. That mission has expanded quite a bit over the course of the last couple of years and today, Y42 announced the launch of what it calls its “Modern DataOps Cloud.” Buil

Xata gives Jamstack developers access to a serverless data platform with an API call

A couple of years ago, Xata founder Monica Sarbu was putting together a passion project called Tupu.io, a platform she was building to help women in tech find mentors. She wanted to include a Postgres database with Elastic search in the Tupu web application, and as a side project, she wanted it to

Alation bags $123M at a $1.7B valuation for its data-cataloging software

There’s been an explosion of enterprise data in recent years, accelerated by pandemic-spurred digital transformations. An IDC report commissioned by Seagate projected companies would collect 42.2% more data by year-end 2022 than in 2020, amounting to multiple petabytes of data in total. While

Unicorns face 5-1 odds as they wait for public markets to warm

Earlier today, The Exchange dug into changing investor sentiment regarding growth and profitability. A new report looking at cloud and software companies from Battery Ventures ran the math on how investors are rewarding faster growth from less unprofitable companies — dare we say, profitable comp

Metrist raises $5.5M to provide better cloud service outage data

Metrist, a startup that helps IT teams stay on top of outages among the many cloud services they use to run their own applications, today announced that it has raised a $5.5 million seed round from the likes of Heavybit, Morado Ventures and PagerDuty co-founder Alex Solomon and StatusPage co-founde

MLOps platform Galileo lands $18M to launch a free service

Galileo, a startup launching a platform for AI model development, today announced that it raised $18 million in a Series A round led by Battery Ventures with participation from The Factory, Walden Catalyst, FPV Ventures, Kaggle co-founder Anthony Goldbloom and other angel investors. The new cash br

HR employee benefits platform Fringe raises $17M to offer customizable perks

Fringe, an HR tech startup enabling companies to offer customizable perks and benefits to employees, today announced that it raised $17 million in a funding round led by Origin Ventures and Felton Group. CEO Jordan Peace says that the proceeds will be put toward growing the team from 72 employees t

TouchBistro bakes CAD$150M into restaurant management tech recipe

TouchBistro, an iPad-based restaurant management platform, secured CAD$150 million, or $110 million, in growth financing from Francisco Partners to accelerate its growth, expand its product pipeline and make some strategic acquisitions. It's been a while since we checked in with the Toronto-bas

Arnica raises $7M to improve software supply chain security

Everybody wants to talk about software supply chain risks these days, whether that’s security teams, developers or government officials. It’s no surprise then, that VCs, despite the current economic climate, continue to fund startups in this space, too. One of the newest members in this

With Bret Taylor out as Twitter board chair, he can focus entirely on Salesforce

Usually being a board chair is a job that involves running some meetings and pushing through routine company business, but when Bret Taylor became Twitter board chair last year, he was getting a lot more than he bargained for. Taylor was promoted to the job in November 2021, the same day Jack Dorse

Rising energy costs are making the cloud more expensive

Since winter, around the start of the war in Ukraine, energy costs have risen drastically — particularly in parts of Europe historically dependent on Russian fuel. That’s impacted data centers, which aren’t directly reliant on resources like natural gas but which often draw on power g