Welcome to the latest edition of the SaaS weekly roundup, your weekly newsletter of all things software-as-a-service. This week, we’ve some significant acquisitions, funding announcements, interesting podcasts and videos in the SaaS space. So without further delay, let’s jump right in.
Table of Contents
News of the week
Synopsys buying SaaS security company WhiteHat for $330million
We’re seeing an increased interest in the security space, so it isn’t really surprising to see semiconductor, automation, and security testing firm Synopsis acquiring Whitehat Security to boost its SaaS security capabilities. The acquisition will help the company in providing market-leading DAST (Dynamic application security testing) technology, and is pegged at $330million
CredAvenue picks up majority stake in SaaS firm Corpository at Rs 100 crore valuation
Among the newest unicorns from India, CredAvenue has purchased a majority stake in SaaS-based credit underwriting company Corpository. The deal is valued at Rs 100 crore (~$14million). As of now, Corpository has credit intelligence data of over a 2.5million Indian companies.
Salesforce extends Flow automations across Mulesoft, Slack and Tableau
The CRM pioneer Salesforce introduced Flow, a low-code tool for process automation in 2021. Now, Flow will work across more products from Salesforce’s stable – Mulesoft, Slack, and Tableau. In Mulesoft, users will be able to integrate data from any business system into a workflow, whereas Slack users will be able to automate various manual tasks. For Tableau users, Flow Actions will provide the ability to automatically launch a new workflow or initiate actions when a certain condition is met.
SaaS companies that got the funding this week
Hong Kong SaaS firm Coherent raises $75million Series B led by Maverick Capital
HK-based no-code SaaS provider Coherent has nabbed $75million in Series B funding. Led by Maverick Capital, the startup will be using the amount to accelerate the growth of the product, engineering, and sales teams in the US and Asia-Pacific regions.
QuotaPath raised a $41million Series B with a focus on growing its SaaS product
Commission tracking and compensation management platform QuotaPath has closed a $41million investment as part of its Series B round, led by Tribe Capital. The startup highlighted that it’s seeing a rapid growth as its employees grew from 20 to about 70 in the last year, while its revenue witnessed a 480 percent increase y-o-y.
Clerk bags new capital to improve in-store grocery shopping experience
While all eyes are on online grocery delivery (especially in the q-commerce sector), there’s no denying that most of the grocery shopping happens in retail stores only. Clerk is aiming to digitize the brick-and-mortar grocery experience. It has also launched a SaaS merchandising product that leverages machine learning to inform whether the products are in-stock and are present on the right shelves.
Fleet nabs $20million to enable enterprises to manage their devices
Fleet helps enterprises track and manage devices like laptops. It has announced a $20million Series A round led by CRV. Along with laptops, the startup manages IoT devices and servers, acting as a source of truth for device data. Fleet is aiming to double its headcount to 40 employees by 2023.
CommandBar lands $19million to inject in-app searches with smarts
As the name suggests, CommandBar lets users search for things in their own words rather than trying to understand the complex buttons and menus of new software. The service lives inside the mobile apps, and claims to reach three million end-users through the apps it powers. It has gotten $19million in Series A investment co-led by Insight Partners and Lightrights co-founder.
Deepset raises $14M to help companies build NLP apps
NLP has been growing at an unprecedented pace as it helps in parsing text for summarization, context generation, and more. Deepset, a startup that has introduced the open source NLP framework Haystack, has raised $14million in Series A funding. The round was led by GV, and alongside the funding announcement, the startup also announced Deepset Cloud, a subscription product that enables one to build NLP-powered software.
Related video: Deepset: moving open source NLP forward
Must reads
10 technical strategies to avoid when scaling your startup (and 5 to embrace)
What is churn? How can it be negative? And what’s a good monthly churn rate?
Listen to
Charting the Journey of Xoxoday from Zero to $10million ARR
Xoxoday offers employee engagement and gamification software. In this episode, Xoxoday’s co-founder Manoj Agarwal shares his journey of starting the company, how it achieved the product-market fit, and how it reached $10million ARR.
HubSpot’s CEO Yamini Rangan on ditching the funnel for the Flywheel
CRM software HubSpot announced that Yamini Rangan will become its new CEO last year. In this engaging conversation with Intercom’s Chief Marketing Officer Anna Griffin, she shares her journey, the importance of customer engagement, and the Flywheel approach that helps organizations grow while delivering a good customer experience.
Peter McKay (Snyk): leading through hypergrowth
Hypergrowth seems quite attractive from the outside, but achieving – and more importantly, sustaining it – is hard. Snyk’s Peter McKay shares how the vulnerability management software managed to do that while bringing in new talent to avoid plateaus.
Watch
Exotel’s Shivku on failed funding round to building $60million ARR Saas startup
Call center software Exotel is a perfect example of perseverance. The company has been standing strong amidst all the challenges, and a lot of that is because of its co-founder Shivkumar’s conviction. He talks about the idea behind Exotel, how they reached $1million in ARR, and the challenges they faced along the way, among others.
