Best practices as a service is a key investment theme to watch in 2021

Enterprise IT has been completely transformed by SaaS the past decade. Okta last week published a report that showed that the largest companies now use 175 apps, a doubling over the past few years. More professionals have more tools to do their jobs than ever before. It's an explosion of creati

Databricks raises $1B at $28B valuation as it reaches $425M ARR

Another hour, another billion-dollar round. That’s how February is kicking off. This time it’s Databricks, which just raised $1 billion Series G at a whopping $28 billion post-money valuation. Databricks is a data-and-AI focused company that interacts with corporate information stored i

Telemedico gets $6.6M to grow the reach of its digital health SaaS

Poland-based Telemedico has closed a €5.5 million (~$6.6 million) Series A round of funding. The round is led by Flashpoint Venture Capital, Uniqa Ventures, PKO VC, Black Pearls VC (an existing investor) and Adamed. Telehealth services specifically, and digital health more broadly, have racked up

Weights & Biases raises $45M for its machine learning tools

Weights & Biases, a startup building tools for machine learning practitioners, is announcing that it has raised $45 million in Series B funding. The company was founded by Lukas Biewald, Chris Van Pelt and Shawn Lewis — Biewald and Van Pelt previously founded CrowdFlower/Figure Eight (acquire

Rapid7 acquires Kubernetes security startup Alcide for $50M

Boston-based security operations company Rapid7 has been making moves into the cloud recently, and this morning it announced that it has acquired Kubernetes security startup Alcide for $50 million. As the world shifts to cloud native using Kubernetes to manage containerized workloads, it’s tr

Extra Crunch roundup: Edtech VC survey, 5 founder mistakes, fintech liquidity, more

Edtech is so widespread, we already need more consumer-friendly nomenclature to describe the products, services and tools it encompasses. I know someone who reads stories to their grandchildren on two continents via Zoom each weekend. Is that “edtech?” Similarly, many Ne

Okta SaaS report finds Office 365 wins the cloud — sort of

Each year Okta processes millions of SaaS logons via its authentication system. It kindly aggregates that data to find the most popular apps and publishes an annual report. This year it found that the most popular tool by far was Microsoft Office 365. It’s worth noting that while app usage po

Cadeera is doing AI visual search for home décor

In recent years we’ve seen a whole bunch of visual/style fashion-focused search engines cropping up, tailored to helping people find the perfect threads to buy online by applying computer vision and other AI technologies to perform smarter-than-keywords visual search which can easily match an

Hong Kong startup ICW eyes supply chain diversification demand amid trade war

For American importers, finding suppliers these days can be challenging not only due to COVID-19 travel restrictions. The U.S. government’s entity list designations, human-rights-related sanctions, among other trade blacklists targeting Chinese firms have also rattled U.S. supply chains. One

Workday nabs employee feedback platform Peakon for $700M

Workday started the work day with some big news today. It’s acquiring employee feedback platform Peakon for $700 million in cash. One thing we have learned during the pandemic is that organizations need to find new ways to build stronger connections with their employees, and that’s prec

Pinecone lands $10M seed for purpose-built machine learning database

Pinecone, a new startup from the folks who helped launch Amazon SageMaker, has built a vector database that generates data in a specialized format to help build machine learning applications faster, something that was previously only accessible to the largest organizations. Today the company came o

SAP launches ‘RISE with SAP,’ a concierge service for digital transformation

SAP today announced a new offering it calls ‘RISE with SAP,’ a solution that is meant to help the company’s customers go through their respective digital transformations and become what SAP calls ‘intelligent enterprises.’ RISE is a subscription service that combines a

Following acquisition, Episerver rebrands as Optimizely

After acquiring Optimizely last fall, content management company Episerver is adopting the Optimizely name for the entire organization. CEO Alex Atzberger told me that the company will be rolling out new branding in the next coming months, as well as renaming its entire product suite to reflect the

Playvox scores $25M investment and acquires Australian startup Agyle Time

It’s not every day you see a Latin American startup funded by a U.S. venture capital firm based in the midwest. Playvox, a Colombian startup that wants to bring a positive twist to customer service monitoring announced a $25 million investment from Five Elms Capital, a Kansas City, MO VC firm