The Galaxy’s Edge area no longer requires a reservation, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get in.
Source: CNET
Sales teams have long turned to tech solutions to help improve how they source leads, develop relationships and close deals. Now, one of the startups that helps out at a key point in that trajectory is announcing a round of growth funding to help fuel its own rapid growth. Showpad, a sales enablement platform that lets salespeople source and organise relevant content and other collateral that they use in their deals, has raised a Series D of $70 million.
The funding, which brings the total raised by Showpad to $160 million, is coming in the form of debt and equity. The equity part is co-led by Dawn Capital and Insight Partners, with existing investors Hummingbird Ventures, and Korelya Capital also participating. Silicon Valley Bank is providing debt financing. This is one of the first big investments out of Dawn’s Opportunities Fund that we wrote about last week.
The company is not disclosing its valuation but Pieterjan Bouten, the CEO who co-founded the company with Louis Jonckheere (currently CPO), confirmed that it has doubled since the $50 million Series C that it raised in 2016, with the company growing 90% year-on-year at the moment in terms of revenues.
And as a point of reference, another sales enablement player, Seismic, last December raised a Series E of $100 million at a $1 billion valuation.
Founded in Ghent, Belgium, Showpad today operates across two main headquarters, its original European base and Chicago. The latter was the homebase of LearnCore, a company that Showpad acquired last year that focuses on sales coaching and training, which has been used as a strategic acquisition to expand Showpad’s primary product, a platform that acts as a kind of content management system for sales collateral. (Today, while Chicago is where Showpad builds its go-to market efforts and professional services, Ghent focuses on engineering and product, he said.) As it happens, Chicago is also the headquarters of Seismic.
As Bouten sees it, Showpad is part of what he considers to be the fourth pillar of the technology marketing stack: storage (the cloud services where you keep all your data), CRM, marketing automation and sales enablement, where Showpad sits.
While the first three are key to helping to manage a salesperson’s activities and work, the fourth is a crucial one for helping to make sure a salesperson can do his or her job more effectively. Traditionally a lot of the content that salespeople used — presentations, white papers, other materials — to help make their cases and close their deals would be managed offline and directly by individual salespeople. Showpad has taken some of that process and made it digital, which means that now teams of salespeople can more effectively share materials amongst each other; and interestingly the material and its link to successful sales becomes part of how Showpad “learns” what works and what doesn’t.
That, in turn, helps build its own artificial intelligence algorithms, to help suggest the best materials for a particular sales effort either to someone else in that team, or to other salespeople using the platform.
“To date there has been enormous innovation in automating the marketing and sales workflow. However, in the end, sales comes down to one person selling to another,� said Norman Fiore, General Partner at Dawn Capital and member of the Showpad Board, in a statement. “Historically, this has been an offline process that has been wildly inconsistent and opaque. Showpad’s suite of products succeeds in bringing this process online for the first time with data-rich feedback loops on the effectiveness of teams, managers, salespeople and even individual pieces of sales content.�
This is a crowded area of the market with a number of standalone companies building sales enablement solutions, but also other companies within the sales stack also adding on enablement as a value-added service. For now, though, Bouten notes that these are more strategic partners than competitors. Salesforce is a partner, he says, and “We integrate with Salesloft to make sure sure emails that are sent out are using the right content. We become the single source of truth but also are being used for outreach.”
Today, the company has around 1,200 enterprise customers, including Johnson & Johnson, GE Healthcare, Bridgestone, Honeywell, and Merck, and the plan going forward will be to continue building out the services that it offers around its sales enablement software.
“You can equip sales people with the best content, but if they are not trained and coached in the right way, it goes nowhere,” he said.
Source: TechCrunch
Open, a Bangalore-based startup that operates a “neo-bank� to help businesses automate and run their finances, has bagged $30 million in a new funding round as investors look to replicate a globally tried and tested business idea in emerging markets.
The Series B financing round for the two-year-old startup was led by Tiger Global with Tanglin Venture Partners Advisors and existing investors 3one4 Capital, Speedinvest, BetterCapital AngelList Syndicate also participating in it. The new round valued Open at $150 million, a person familiar with the matter said. The startup has raised about $37 million to date.
Open operates as a neo-bank that offers nearly all the features of the bank with additional tools to serve the needs of a business. Millions of small and medium sized businesses in India struggle with maintaining multiple bank accounts, bookkeeping of their daily spending, and bandying out payments to employees.
Open offers them a platform that automates much of this task. It lets them keep track of each transaction — who it came from, where it is going, and what sales it made across accounts.
“We have a small business owner from Ahmedabad on our platform. They see 59 transactions from their customers in its bank account every few hours. Prior to using our service, they were juggling all day to figure out where these transactions originated from or went to,� he explained. “Because on their bank statement, they only see one-line description of a transaction’s detail.�
Traditional banks have either not addressed these small needs, or charge huge amount for their own solutions that is not feasible for a small business, he added.
The startup says it already has over 100,000 customers, with as many as 20,000 coming onboard each month of late. It processes about $5 billion in transactions each year.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Anish Achuthan, founder and CEO of Open, said the startup saw an opportunity to serve the businesses and wanted to open a better bank. “But building a bank in India comes with its own set of regulatory challenges, so we looked at what fintech startups were doing in other parts of the world for inspiration,� he said.
And it found that inspiration quickly enough. One of its early investors is Speedinvest, which has funded Tide and N26 ‘neo-banks’ in European markets. In India, Open has partnered with ICICI Bank, one of the biggest banks in the nation, for creation of accounts. On ICICI Bank’s internet banking website, Open has integrated its tools including a payment gateway, Achuthan explained.
Achuthan said the startup, which employs 85 people currently, will use the fresh capital to significantly expand its business — build more products, hire more people, and sign up more customers. Open will soon also launch Open+ card, a business credit card with a 30-day interest-free credit line for venture backed startups, and Layer, a programmable bank account for developers. In the next one year, the startup aims to grow its customer base to 1 million.
Open raised its Series A of $5 million earlier this year. When asked if it’s a very capital intensive business, Achuthan said they needed the money to get a first-mover advantage. The startup was in talks with another investor to raise an additional $20 million, but Achuthan said they did not need that much money at this stage.
Open today competes with a handful of startups including InstantPay, but Achuthan said much of the market remains untapped.
Source: TechCrunch
The 5G revolution is rolling out now. Here are the super-fast 5G devices that are available now or coming soon.
Source: CNET
These are the 5G-ready phones you need to take advantage of new 5G networks
Source: CNET
Apple’s new software for iPhones this fall has some great new tools.
Source: CNET
Screams by high schoolers didn’t trigger the detector, but some coughs did. So did cheers for pizza.
Source: Wired
KoinWorks, an Indonesian startup that helps small and medium-sized businesses secure financial services through its online peer-to-peer platform, has raised $16.5 million SGD ($12 million USD) in a new funding round as money continues to flow in what has become a hot space for investors.
The Series B round for the three-year-old startup was led by EV Growth and Quona Capital . Existing investors — Mandiri Capital Indonesia, Convergence Ventures, Gunung Sewu, Beeblebrox and Quona Capital — also participated in the round, the startup said in a statement. The new round means KoinWorks has raised more than $28.5 million to date.
SMEs have historically struggled with securing loan and other financial services from banks — creating a big opportunity for middlemen lending platforms. KoinWorks operates an online platform that uses machine learning to provide low interest loans to these small and medium sized enterprises. It identifies the businesses that are eligible to make the return eventually and connects them with lenders.
The platform has amassed more than 300,000 users, it claimed. More than 60% of the lenders are millennials and for 70%, it is their first time investment. Willy Arifin, a founder and CEO of KoinWorks said the startup aims to “democratize finance in Indonesia while fostering financial inclusion.�
Surprisingly, KoinWorks raised a bigger amount — $16.5 million (USD) in its Series A round in the second half of last year. Arifin insisted that the round was intentionally oversubscribed, suggesting that the existing shareholders of the startup were unwilling to overly dilute their stake. The new round “does not reflect the true appetite of investors in KoinWorks,â€� he added.
KoinWorks competes with a number of local startups including Akseleran, Investree, Reksadana, Amartha, and Modalku. It also fights with Funding Societies, which received $25 million last year to expand its business in several Southeast Asian markets. Soon, it will have a new competitor in Validus Capital, which raised $15 million earlier this year and announced its plan to enter Indonesia this quarter.
The new round comes at a time when Indonesia is pushing strict regulatory changes for peer-to-peer lending businesses in an attempt to ensure that the chaos in China does not seep into Indonesia.
Source: TechCrunch
At its NEXTGen event in Munich, BMW today announced that it is running ahead of schedule in its efforts to offer at least 25 electrified vehicles. Previously, the German luxury car manufacturer was shooting for 2025, but it now says that it will offer these 25 vehicles by 2023.
As BMW’s Klaus Fröhlich stressed at a press event ahead of today’s announcement, BMW will continue to offer a full range of vehicles that span from fully-electric to hybrids and standard combustion-engine powered cars for the foreseeable future. More than half of the 25 vehicles the company is talking about today, though, will be fully electric.
“We are moving up a gear in the transformation towards sustainable mobility, thereby making our company fit for the future: Over the past two years, we have consistently taken numerous decisions that we are now bringing to the roads,” said BMW CEO Harald Krüger. “By 2021, we will have doubled our sales of electrified vehicles compared with 2019.”
The company expects that its electrified car sales will continue to grow by more than 30 percent per year up to 2025. Indeed, it expects to have sold more than half a billion fully-electric or plug-in hybrids by the end of 2019. That’s a tough goal to achieve, Krüger admitted. He also noted that BMW plans to power all of its plants with renewable energy from next year onward.
Right now, that number is definitely driven by sales of the somewhat quirky i3, with 150,000 on the roads today. Then, over the course of the next few years, the i3 will be joined by a fully-electric Mini, iX3, and then the i4 and iNext.
By 2020, all of these plug-in hybrids will also feature a new tool that will make driving them in cities that ban combustion engines from their city centers: BMW eDrive Zones. This feature, which is a first for car manufacturers, will automatically detect when you enter a zone where only electric vehicles are allowed and then switch to running on batteries until you leave. The company is already testing this in the Dutch city of Rotterdam and plans to roll it out to the X5 and 3-series first.
In the BMW app, the company will also allow its customers to collect ‘BMW points” in its mobile app, which they can earn by using their hybrid car’s electric mode. With this, the company is essentially gamifying electric driving (and the charging that goes with that). Drivers can then use these points for charging credits from ChargeNow and, in the future, get credits for ParkNow, DriveNow and other BMW services.
Source: TechCrunch
Gone are the days when you had to spend a grand or more to get a great gaming laptop. PC makers like Dell are cranking out some excellent and affordable machines today like the Dell G5587, which is on sale right now for just $799.
Source: Digital trends