Welcome back to your weekly dose of all things SaaS, wherein we bring news that matter, acquisitions, and funding announcements in the burgeoning space, and also leave you with some must-listen podcasts and must-watch videos. As always, we have gotten a ton of content for you, so let’s begin.
Table of Contents
News of the week
Cisco acquires ThousandEyes for around $1 billion to make deeper push into software
Networking giant Cisco has announced the acquisition of SaaS company Thousand Eyes, which analyzes the performance of the local and wide area networks. While the terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, the purchase price was reportedly $1billion.
Share folders in shared drives with a new beta
Google has made a small-but-important update for Google Drive. Until now, if you have shared a drive with others, then you can’t share the individual folders inside with someone else. However, it has now changed that, and you can selectively choose individual folders to be shared as well.
SaaS startup Clumio taps into Indian talent, launches R&D center in Bengaluru
California-based Clumio is expanding to the Indian market by launching an R&D Center. Launched in 2017, the startup provides a secure backup service for enterprises. It already has 34 employees working in the center and aims to double them by the end of the year, and the team has already started delivering such as working on adding Microsoft 365 to its list of supported cloud services.
Salesforce declines after light guidance
Leading SaaS company Salesforce announced its latest quarterly results. While its revenues increased by 30 percent y-o-y to $4.87billion, it has provided guidance for the future because of the coronavirus pandemic. It expects the revenue to increase slightly to between $4.89 billion and $4.90billion in this quarter.
VMware delivers solid Q1 as subscription, SaaS revenue jumps
In contrast, VMware witnessed significant growth with its revenue jumping 39\% from last year to $2.73billion. However, the company didn’t provide any guidance for the second quarter of the year.
Box beats Q1 estimates as enterprises look for secure remote work solutions
Leading cloud service provider Box has also announced its quarterly results. Unsurprisingly, the company witnessed a robust growth amidst the COVID-19 pandemic with its revenue growing by 13 percent to $186.3million. It also expects the growth to continue, though small businesses might impact its revenue.
Workday, Microsoft forge partnership revolving around Adaptive Planning, Teams, Azure integration
Popular HR software Workday has joined hands with the Redmond giant to offer the ability to run Workday Adaptive Planning on Microsoft’s Azure. The latter will also utilize the software in its finance team for planning, budgeting, and forecasting purposes. Additionally, the companies will integrate their offerings in Workday, Microsoft Teams, and Azure Active Directory.
Along with that, Workday also announced that it’ll work with Salesforce’s Work.com as well as announced its quarterly revenues, which are at $1.02billion.
SaaS companies that got the funding this week
Call center software startup Aircall raises $65M
Coronavirus has also made call center software more popular, and France-based Aircall is riding the wave as well. It has raised $65million Series C funding, which was led by DTCP. Aircall provides software to help companies transition from legacy call center systems, and can also integrate CRM like Salesforce and Zoho.
Related listen: Jonathan Anguelov on Aircall’s $65 million Series C success
DefinedCrowd raises $50.5M in record-breaking Series B round
With AI continuing to become mainstream, the data to improve it further is also becoming more important than ever. DefinedCrowd has a community of people that improve the training data to refine the AI further. For expansion, it has now received $50.5million funding as part of the Series B round.
Bluecore raises $50M for its first-party, AI-based marketing automation tools
From a company that provides training data for AI to one that offers AI-based marketing automation tools. Bluecore gains data from social media, emails, site activity, and more to provide predictions about which users are likely to buy. It’s gotten $50million Series D funding led by Georgian Partners for expanding further.
Wasabi builds on explosive growth with $30 million funding round
Wasabi, a hot cloud storage company, has closed a $30million round which was led by Forestay Capital. Amid the crisis, Wasabi has seen the amount of data stored on its platform grow 4x versus the last year, while its revenue increased by 5x y-o-y. The funding will help the startup expand its infrastructure and cater to more markets.
Gatsby, website-building startup backed by Index Ventures, raises $28 Million
Website– and app-building software Gatsby has raised $28million Series B funding. The investment was led by Index Ventures, the startup is aiming to power 1 percent of websites by 2024.
Baton raises $10M Series A to organize post-sale implementation
If you think once your startup is sold, everything is a rosy affair, then you’d be in for a shock, just like Alex Krug noticed when Behance was acquired by Adobe. Companies had to work on a cobbled-up solution to bring project management tools, etc. in one place. To make it easier for both the acquirer and acquiree to be on the same page, he has launched Baton which has just come out of stealth, and garnered Series A funding.
RudderStack raises $5M seed round for its open-source Segment competitor
Open-source data management software RudderStack has received $5million Seed funding, which was led by S28 Capital. The company also announced that it has bought an integration platform that helps companies move data from their data sources to databases.
Must reads
What the hell, SaaS valuations?
From hackathon To $20k MRR – Document360 grew through SaaS SEO
How Automattic pays its remote employees across different geographies
Listen to
Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield answers your messages
Workplace collaboration software Slack has become the go-to choice for many companies who have transitioned to remote work overnight. In this podcast, Slack’s CEO Stewart Butterfield shares how the company has stepped up at the time of the crisis, what he thinks about Microsoft Teams as a potential competitor, and the future of work among other things.
The secret to success in product led growth — according to HubSpot’s Kieran Flanagan
Product led growth has been in the buzz for a while now, but if you still need to understand how companies are leveraging it, then this podcast is for you. Hubspot’s Kieran Flanagan worked on a team a few years back which created a free Chrome extension and using principles of PLG, they were able to turn that into a freemium business. He also shares why this approach requires cross-functional collaboration.
SurveyMonkey’s Leela Srinivasan on powering the curious
SurveyMonkey’s first CMO Leela Srinivasan talks about why feedback – both internal and external – is an important aspect for growth and surveys can help in identifying that. She also shares about how teams should be aligned and informed to keep everyone’s eyes on the goal.
Watch
SaaStr’s New New in Venture 2020
We’ve always applauded SaaStr for its conferences, and it’s bringing the same level of energy to its virtual events. After last month’s Bridging The Gap Summit, it held The New New in Venture summit on May 27th, and now has uploaded all the talks from it on YouTube.
Own Your Growth 2020
Another virtual conference was held recently – Predictable Revenue’s Own Your Growth 2020 – and you can find its talks on YouTube as well. These include talks from the people hailing from popular SaaS companies like ChartMogul, lemlist and ProfitWell.
