Salesforce delivers, Wall Street doubts as stock falls 6.3% post-earnings
Wall Street investors can be fickle beasts. Take Salesforce as an example. The CRM giant announced a $5.82 billion quarter when it reported earnings yesterday. Revenue was up 20% year over year. The company also reported $21.25 billion in total revenue for the just-closed FY2021, up 24% YoY. If tha
In freemium marketing, product analytics are the difference between conversion and confusion
The freemium marketing approach has become commonplace among B2C and B2B software providers alike. Considering that most see fewer than 5% of free users move to paid plans, even a slight improvement in conversion can translate to significant revenue gains. The (multi) million-dollar question is, ho
Atlassian is acquiring Chartio to bring data visualization to the platform
The Atlassian platform is chock full of data about how a company operates and communicates. Atlassian launched a machine learning layer, which relies on data on the platform with the addition of Atlassian Smarts last fall. Today the company announced it was acquiring Chartio to add a new data analy
DigitalOcean’s IPO filing shows a two-class cloud market
This morning DigitalOcean, a provider of cloud computing services to SMBs, filed to go public. The company intends to list on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker symbol “DOCN.”
DigitalOcean’s offering comes amidst a hot streak for tech IPOs, and valuations that are
Why F5 spent $2.2B on 3 companies to focus on cloud native applications
It’s essential for older companies to recognize changes in the marketplace or face the brutal reality of being left in the dust. F5 is an old-school company that launched back in the 90s, yet has been able to transform a number of times in its history to avoid major disruption. Over the last
DataJoy raises $6M seed to help SaaS companies track key business metrics
Every business needs to track fundamental financial information, but the data typically lives in a variety of silos, making it a constant challenge to understand a company’s overall financial health. DataJoy, an early-stage startup, wants to solve that issue. The company announced a $6 millio
Google Cloud puts its Kubernetes Engine on autopilot
Google Cloud today announced a new operating mode for its Kubernetes Engine (GKE) that turns over the management of much of the day-to-day operations of a container cluster to Google’s own engineers and automated tools. With Autopilot, as the new mode is called, Google manages all of the Day
Select Star raises seed to automatically document datasets for data scientists
Back when I was a wee lad with a very security-compromised MySQL installation, I used to answer every web request with multiple “SELECT *” database requests — give me all the data and I'll figure out what to do with it myself.
Today in a modern, data-intensive org, “SELECT *” will kil
Aquarium scores $2.6M seed to refine machine learning model data
Aquarium, a startup from two former Cruise employees, wants to help companies refine their machine learning model data more easily and move the models into production faster. Today the company announced a $2.6 million seed led by Sequoia with participation from Y Combinator and a bunch of angel inv
Hydrolix snares $10M seed to lower the cost of processing log data at scale
Many companies spend a significant amount of money and resources processing data from logs, traces and metrics, forcing them to make trade-offs about how much to collect and store. Hydrolix, an early-stage startup, announced a $10 million seed round today to help tackle logging at scale, while usin
Acumen nabs $7M seed to keep engineering teams on track
Engineering teams face steep challenges when it comes to staying on schedule, and keeping to those schedules can have an impact on the entire organization. Acumen, an Israeli engineering operations startup, announced a $7 million seed investment today to help tackle this problem.
Hetz, 10D, Crescen
Blueshift raises $30M for its AI-based, integrated approach to marketing
The concept of the “marketing cloud” — sold by the likes of Salesforce, Oracle and Adobe — has become a standard way for large tech companies to package together and sell marketing tools to businesses that want to improve how they use digital channels to grow their business.
How to overcome the challenges of switching to usage-based pricing
The usage-based pricing model almost feels like a cheat code — it enables SaaS companies to more efficiently acquire new customers, grow with those customers as they're successful and keep those customers on the platform.
Compared to their peers, companies with usage-based pricing trade at a
Kleeen raises $3.8M to make front-end design for business applications easy
Building a front-end for business applications is often a matter of reinventing the wheel, but because every business’ needs are slightly different, it’s also hard to automate. Kleeen is the latest startup to attempt this, with a focus on building the user interface and experience for t