Melissa Wong spent more than a decade working for major retail brands before founding Retail Zipline. That kind of outrageous advantage — a complete understanding of the industry — is something that investors struggle to resist in a vertical SaaS company. At least, according to Emergence Capital investor Lotti Siniscalco. Wong and Siniscalco joined us…
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Netskope, focused on Secure Access Service Edge architecture, announced Friday a $300 million investment round on a post-money valuation of $7.5 billion. The oversubscribed insider investment was led by ICONIQ Growth, which was joined by other existing investors, including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Accel, Sequoia Capital Global Equities, Base Partners, Sapphire Ventures and Geodesic Capital. Netskope…
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Abhinav Shashank Contributor Innovaccer founder and CEO Abhinav Shashank has written more than 300 articles for various international media outlets and has also been listed in Forbes’ “30 Under 30 Asia 2017: Enterprise Tech” and among the “Top 60 rising leaders in U.S. healthcare under 40” in the 2019 Becker’s Hospital Review. Mike Sutten Contributor…
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Expensify EC-1 Part 5: Business model Anna Heim 7 hours You’d expect an expense management company to have a large sales department and advertise through all kinds of channels to maximize customer acquisition. But like we’ve seen over and over through the course of this EC-1, Expensify just doesn’t do what you think it should.…
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Jason VandeBoom Contributor Jason VandeBoom is founder and CEO of ActiveCampaign, a customer experience automation (CXA) company. 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…
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Charity Dean has been in the national spotlight lately because she was among a group of doctors, scientists and tech entrepreneurs who sounded the pandemic alarm early last year and who are featured in a new book by Michael Lewis about the U.S. response, called The Premonition. It’s no wonder the press — and, seemingly…
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Things have been looking up for Belfast since the end of the Troubles. The city has undergone infrastructure improvements over the past two decades, tourism has boomed thanks to attractions such as the shipyard where the RMS Titanic was built and Game of Thrones shooting locations, and employment has risen steadily in the city since…
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Origin stories are satisfying because we already know the hero will overcome the odds — and in doing so, they’ll reveal their core strengths. This week, we published a four-part series about how Klaviyo co-founders Andrew Bialecki and Ed Hallen bootstrapped their startup into an e-commerce marketing automation platform now valued at $4.15 billion. Neither…
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Your clients might not demand 24/7 customer service yet, but they’re certainly hoping for it. But how can a startup with a lean staff provide round-the-clock customer care? There are several options available, but more than ever, outsourcing is one of them. When should your startup consider outsourcing its customer care? And what should you…
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After an upward revision, UiPath priced its IPO last night at $56 per share, a few dollars above its raised target range. The above-range price meant that the unicorn put more capital into its books through its public offering. For a company in a market as competitive as robotic process automation (RPA), the funds are…
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