Microsoft posted a relatively good second quarter this year that continued the ongoing process of its growth into a major cloud entity, in addition to saying it would be taking a significant charge as part of the major tax bill signed late last year. In particular, Microsoft said that its Azure revenue grew 98% year-over-year — a long-running theme alongside many other lines that equate… Read More
If you’re more of a Gmail power user (or even semi-power user) and other email services geared toward work, you’ve probably installed plenty of plugins like Rapportive to make your job a little bit easier. And while it’s all fine to try to pull together a suite of plugins to make that a little bit easier, a startup called Polymail is hoping to rope that all into a single hub… Read More
Fujifilm announced this week that it’s set to take a majority stake in Xerox. The news comes as the U.S. tech stalwart and photocopying synonym struggles to cope with an eroding demand for office printers and photocopies. The boards of both companies agreed to the deal this week, giving Fujifilm a 50.1-percent stake in the combined companies. The naming conventions on this one are… Read More
Bench, the TechStars-backed bookkeeping service for SMBs, has today announced the close of an $18 million B-1 funding round led by iNovia Capital. Existing investors, including Bain Capital Ventures, Altos Ventures, and Silicon Valley Bank, also participated in the round. Bench first launched out of TechStars NYC in 2012. Back then, the company was called 10Sheet, and it aimed to providing… Read More
Red Hat, a company best known for its enterprise Linux products, has been making a big play for Kubernetes and containerization in recent years with its OpenShift Kubernetes product. Today the company decided to expand on that by acquiring CoreOS, a container management startup, for $250 million. Read More
Heptio holds a special place in the Kubernetes startup ecosystem. Its co-founders are, after all, two of the co-founders of the Kubernetes project. Heptio has raised millions, but it was never clear what their business plan looked like beyond offering training and professional services. It’s becoming clearer now, as the company today announced the launch of the Heptio Kubernetes… Read More
With Event Grid, Microsoft introduced a new Azure service last year that it hopes will become the glue that holds together modern event-driven and distributed applications. Starting today, Event Grid is generally available, with all the SLAs and other premises this entails. Read More
Hyperledger, the open source blockchain project from the Linux Foundation, released Hyperledger Sawtooth 1.0, its latest open source digital ledger project. Sawtooth joins its sister project, Hyperledger Fabric which reached 1.0 in July last year. Among the features in this latest open source distributed ledger product is on-chain governance, which lets members adjust the rules on the fly… Read More
SAP, the German enterprise software giant, announced it acquired CallidusCloud last night for $2.4 billion or $36 per share. Callidus provides configure price quote (CPQ) and sales performance management tools delivered as a cloud service. The share price is a nice bump for shareholders, representing a 21 percent premium over over the 30-day volume weighted average share price, according to… Read More
The address book is the last, worst default app you rely on. It’s time it got as smart as the rest of our phones. That’s the idea behind SuperPhone. Email isn’t how you build relationships anymore. Yet most business software sanctifies the spammy inbox when it’s the immediacy of text messaging that keeps people in touch today. Musician Ryan Leslie learned that when… Read More
By now you’ve probably heard that the Dell board is supposed to be convening later this month to figure out how it might reorganize itself to deal with the mountain of debt it took on when it bought EMC in 2015 for $67 billion. The rumors began on Friday and involved a couple of possible scenarios including Dell going public or Dell buying VMware (which I’m not sure solves the… Read More
Another startup in the area of cyber security has been snapped up as platform businesses serving enterprises look for more ways of securing their own networks and working with customers to secure theirs. Today, the RELX Group (formerly known as Reed Elsevier) announced that it would acquire ThreatMetrix for £580 million (about $817 million) in cash. This is a big exit for ThreatMetrix, which… Read More
As data privacy becomes an increasingly important notion, especially with the EU’s GDPR privacy laws coming online in May, companies need to find ways to understand their customer’s private data. BigID thinks it has a solution and it landed a $14 million Series A investment today to help grow the idea. Comcast Ventures, SAP (via SAP.io), ClearSky Security Fund and one of the… Read More
We are still in the early days of cryptocurrency — or at least that’s what all of the startups that are jumping into this space NOW hope. And when there’s a gold rush, there’s plenty of money to be made by selling shovels (or ASIC rigs) to miners. It’s no surprise, then, that we are now seeing the emergence of a new class of B2B startups in crypto, too. Read More
IBM today announced a partnership with low-code development platform Mendix that will bring Mendix and native integration with many of IBM’s Watson IoT and AI services to the IBM Cloud. This deal is an evolution of a previous partnership that involved what was then called IBM Bluemix (now IBM Cloud). Read More
Snowflake, the cloud-based data warehouse service, announced an enormous investment round today, pulling in a whopping $263 million on a unicorn valuation of $1.5 billion. The round was led by a trio of big-name Silicon Valley VC firms including existing investors Iconiq Capital and Altimeter Capital and new investor Sequoia Capital. Today’s announcement comes on top of the $100… Read More
Tigera, a San Francisco-based startup that helps businesses connect and secure their container-based applications, today announced that it has raised an additional $10 million in a funding round led by Madrona Venture Group, with participation from New England Associates (NEA) and Wing Venture Capital. Madrona managing partner Soma Somasegar will join the company’s board of directors.… Read More
There’s another big financing round led by Softbank’s mammoth vision fund today, with the firm this time pouring $865 million into a construction startup called Katerra that’s a one-stop shop for getting a building up off the ground. Katerra is creating a full-stack provider for, well, buildings. The company runs the process of getting a building up and people inside it from… Read More
Businesses are gathering more and more information than they ever have before, whether it’s a manufacturer or a bank, and to Timescale CEO Ajay Kulkarni the existing database software soon won’t provide the horsepower they need. That’s why he and CTO Mike Friedman started Timescale, a new open source time series database software. The idea is that businesses increasingly… Read More
When we heard from Sumo Logic last June, the company was announcing a $75 million Series F. Today, they announced they were acquiring FactorChain, a security startup that has raised $3.6 million. The companies would not disclose the purchase price, but indicated the acquisition closed at the end of Q4 and all 12 FactorChain employees have joined Sumo Logic, including CEO Dave Frampton and CTO… Read More
As we inch ever closer to GDPR in May, companies doing business in Europe need to start getting a grip on the sensitive private data they have. The trouble is that as companies move their data into data lakes, massive big data stores, it becomes more difficult to find data in a particular category. Clairvoyant, an Arizona company is releasing a tool called Kogni that could help. Chandra… Read More
Element.AI — which last year raised $102 million from the likes of Microsoft, Intel, Nvidia and more to build an incubator-meets-consultancy to work with multiple businesses as they launch new services and systems based on artificial intelligence — is entering the next phase of its growth this week. The Canadian startup — co-founded by Jean-François Gagné, Nicolas… Read More
Payroll provider ADP said it is acquiring WorkMarket, a startup that specializes in workforce management software that operates across a wide range of employees and contractors, for an undisclosed sum. The software aims to create a kind of unified interface for managing an extended workforce that can include a variety of workers with different employment status, from contractors and… Read More
Back in 2010, Apple’s iconic co-founder Steve Jobs was not entirely enthralled with the enterprise. In fact, Jobs is famously quoted as saying, “What I love about the consumer market, that I always hated about the enterprise market, is that we come up with a product, we try to tell everybody about it, and every person votes for themselves.” Read More
