Welcome to the latest edition of the SaaS weekly roundup. On one hand, more SaaS companies announced their quarterly revenues, while there were several acquisitions too. Of course, as always, there are a ton of funding announcements too.
Table of Contents
News of the week
Cloud stocks plunge to six-month low as investors hasten rotation out of recent top performers
WisdomTree Cloud Computing Fund – an index of cloud-computing companies – has gone down to its lowest level in the past six months. According to analysts, this has happened because many cloud companies announced weaker-than-expected second-quarter forecasts. The companies that saw the biggest tumble include Snowflake, ServiceNow, and Twilio.
Apple service provider Jamf buys zero-trust software vendor Wandera for $400million
Jamf, an enterprise support services provider, is purchasing the zero-trust security provider Wandera. The price of the deal is $350million, plus an additional $50million to be paid in installments within this year.
ServiceNow acquires DevOps observability platform Lightstep
ServiceNow has announced the acquisition of the monitoring and observability platform LightStep. It seems that the observability space is suddenly getting a lot of interest, and this acquisition will help ServiceNow deliver deep operational insights for enterprises. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
This wasn’t the only reason ServiceNow was in news. It has also announced that it’s expanding to other verticals such as manufacturing and healthcare.
DataRobot expands platform and announces Zepl acquisition
Automated machine learning startup DataRobot announced the acquisition of Zepl, a data science and analytics platform. It’ll use the acquisition for its new tool called Composable ML, allowing users to get coding functionality in a no-code environment.
Computing giant HP is aiming to carve a market for itself in the hyper-competitive cybersecurity market. It announced a new cybersecurity business dubbed HP Wolf Security earlier this week which is separate from its hardware operation. The company had acquired security startup Bromium in 2019, which is serving as the foundation for the software.
VMware names Raghu Raghuram as its new CEO
VMWare’s previous CEO Pat Gelsinger had resigned to become the CEO of Intel, and now it has appointed Raghu Raghuram as its CEO. The company also announced preliminary Q1 results for fiscal 2022, with its expected revenue to be $2.994billion.
Camunda breaks new ground with enterprise scale SaaS for process automation
Process automation software Camunda has announced the general availability of Camunda Cloud, an enterprise SaaS solution. Camunda Cloud is aimed at enterprise teams that are looking for scalable process automation services.
Xero adds 450,000 subscribers and posts nearly NZ$20million in profit for 2021
The Australia-based accounting software Xero has reported its financial results for the year ending on March 31st, 2021. It achieved a net profit of NZ$19.8million, while revenue increased 18 percent to NZ$849million.
Wix: Strong Q1, growth accelerating as SMB ramp digital efforts
Website builder software Wix saw a great Q1 as many SMBs continued to transition online. It reported revenue of $304.1million, which increased 41 percent y-o-y. Wix is projecting revenue of $308 to $312million for the second quarter.
Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service
Redmond giant had announced Azure Blockchain Service back in 2015. Now, six years year, it’s announcing that it’ll be shutting it down. While it’ll continue to support existing deployments, no new deployments will be supported.
SaaS companies that got the funding this week
Redwood Software raises $379million for enterprise process automation
Process automation company Redwood software has raised its first external financing as it received €315 million from Turn River Capital. The amount will be deployed for product development and expanding its team.
Ada raises $130million in Series C round at a $1.2billion valuation
AI-based chatbot software Ada has become a unicorn within just four years. The company has closed a $130million Series C round led by Spark Capital. Valued at $1.2billion, it’ll be using the funding to grow its team and expand to new markets.
Continuous software integration/delivery platform CircleCI nabs $100million
CircleCI, a leading company in the continuous integration / delivery (CI/CD) space has nabbed $100million in funding. Valued at $1.7billion, it also announced the acquisition of Vamp, a cloud-native release orchestration platform.
After growing 391 percent, Legion locks up $50million Series C to manage workforces
AI-powered workforce management software Legion has announced $50million funding led by Stripes. The company helps labor-intensive industries like manufacturing, hospitality, and more in managing their workforces using AI.
Stampli raises $50million in Series C to help companies intelligently manage invoices
Corporate invoice management software Stampli has garnered $50million as part of its Series C funding. Stampli makes it easier for the finance department of the company to interact with employees to understand why a certain invoice was generated, whether the service / product was delivered, and more. Led by Insight Partners, the company is aiming to double the size of its business by the next year.
Contract automation platform Contractbook raises $30million to challenge DocuSign
While DocuSign is a defacto leader in the e-signature space, it does get a lot of competition. The latest to join the ranks is Contractbook, which has gotten $30million in Series B funding. The Denmark-based contract management company will be using the financing to expand in the US market.
Collective, a back-office platform for the self-employed, raises $20million from Ashton Kutcher’s VC
Back-office platform Collective has raised $20million Series A funding led by General Catalyst. Worth noting that the startup was founded in September 2020 only, and has raised total funding of $28.65million.
Must reads
How Whereby is using revenue data to conquer freemium
Succeeding with SaaS: 3 strategic shifts required to leave the licensing model behind
Good time to be a SaaS company – IPO day with Similarweb CEO or offer
Listen to
Harness CEO and co-founder Jyoti Bansal on building a second unicorn, lessons learned the next time around
Jyoti Bansal has created not one, but two unicorns – AppDynamics (acquired by Cisco) and now, Harness. In this podcast, he shares his learnings, things that became easier and things that remained challenging the second time, and more.
Gong’s Linda Lin on customer success strategies for moving upmarket
Gong, a revenue intelligence company, has moved strength to strength. In this episode, its Director of Customer Success, Linda Lin shares how it planned for moving upmarket. And more importantly, how it struck a balance in the internal culture to deal with the new set of customers and their requirements.
Qualtrics founder, Ryan Smith on the two-hour decision whether to sell Qualtrics for $8billion in cash, why tying your identity to your company will never make you happy and his relationship to risk, wealth and responsibility as a result
Qualtrics, an experience management software, is unique in so many ways. First it got acquired by SAP, and now it’s a public company as one of the first IPOs of 2021. And its uniqueness could be attributed to its founder Ryan Smith. Listen to him as he shares his journey, learnings, and how his family helped him make better decisions.
Watch
SaaS Marketing Makeover for Miro – w/ Sr. Director of Demand Generation at Workday, Michaela Dempsey
In this video, Directive’s CEO and Co-founder, Garrett Mehrguth, and Senior Director, Demand Generation Global Integrated Marketing Strategy at Workday, Michaela Dempsey discuss the strategy for collaborative whiteboard software Miro.
