Naspers co-leads $14.5M extension round in mobility startup WhereIsMyTransport

Many people in emerging markets depend on informal public transport to move across cities. But while there are ride-hailing and bus-hailing applications in some of these cities, there’s a dire need for journey-planning apps to improve mobility for users and reduce the time they spend commutin

Extra Crunch roundup: Guest posts wanted, ‘mango’ seed rounds, Expensify’s tech stack

Prospective contributors regularly ask us about which topics Extra Crunch subscribers would like to hear more about, and the answer is always the same: Actionable advice that is backed up by data and/or experience. Strategic insights that go beyond best practices and offer specific recommendations

Xometry is taking its excess manufacturing capacity business public

Xometry, a Maryland-based service that connects companies with manufacturers with excess production capacity around the world, filed an S-1 form with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission announcing its intent to become a public company. As the global supply chain tightened during the pandemi

For SaaS startups, differentiation is an iterative process

Software as a service has been thriving as a sector for years, but it has gone into overdrive in the past year as businesses responded to the pandemic by speeding up the migration of important functions to the cloud. We've all seen the news of SaaS startups raising large funding rounds, with de

Gong going gangbusters, grabs $250M Series E on $7.25B valuation

Gong, the revenue intelligence startup, has been raising capital at a rapid pace, and today the company announced another $250 million on a $7.25 billion valuation, a number that triples its previous valuation from last summer. Franklin Templeton led today’s festivities with participation fro

With buyout, Cloudera hunts for relevance in a changing market

When Cloudera announced its sale to a pair of private equity firms yesterday for $5.3 billion, along with a couple of acquisitions of its own, the company detailed a new path that could help it drive back toward relevance in the big data market. When the company launched in 2008, Hadoop was in its

Confluent's IPO brings a high-growth, high-burn SaaS model to the public markets

Confluent became the latest company to announce its intent to take the IPO route, officially filing its S-1 paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission this week. The company, which has raised over $455 million since it launched in 2014, was most recently valued at just over $4.5 bil

Facebook opens its Messenger API for Instagram to all

F8 Refresh, Facebook’s annual developer conference with a new twist — it’s more pared down than in years past, and virtual — is going to be kicking off later today, and ahead of that Facebook is unveiling some news: all businesses can now use the Messenger API to interact wi

Stemma launches with $4.8M seed to build managed data catalogue

As companies increasingly rely on data to run their businesses, having accurate sources of data becomes paramount. Stemma, a new early-stage startup, has come up with a solution, a managed data catalogue that acts as an organization’s source of truth. Today the company announced a $4.8 millio

Celonis snares $1B Series D on $11B valuation

Celonis, the late-stage process mining software startup, announced a $1 billion Series D investment this morning on an eye-popping $11 billion valuation, up from $2.5 billion in its Series C in 2019, quadrupling its value in just two years. Durable Capital Partners LP and T. Rowe Price Associates c

Extra Crunch roundup: Inside Sprinklr’s IPO filing, how digital transformation is reshaping markets

Despite a recent history of uneven cash flow and moderate growth, SaaS customer experience management platform Sprinklr has filed to go public. In today’s edition of The Exchange, Alex Wilhelm pores over the New York-based unicorn’s S-1 to better understand exactly what Sprinklr offers:

Cloudera to go private as KKR & CD&R grab it for $5.3B

Cloudera was once one of the hottest Hadoop startups, but over time the shine has come off that market, and today it went private as KKR and Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, a pair of private equity firms, announced they intended to purchase Cloudera for $5.3 billion. The company has a market cap of a

Once a buzzword, digital transformation is reshaping markets

The notion of digital transformation evolved from a buzzword joke to a critical and accelerating fact during the COVID-19 pandemic. The changes wrought by a global shift to remote work and schooling are myriad, but in the business realm they have yielded a change in corporate behavior and consumer

Box beats expectations, raises guidance as it looks for a comeback

Box executives have been dealing with activist investor Starboard Value over the last year, along with fighting through the pandemic like the rest of us. Today the company reported earnings for the first quarter of its fiscal 2022. Overall, it was a good quarter for the cloud content management com