While this week we didn’t see as many fund-raising announcements (the ones that happened were quite significant though), the SaaS world witnessed a slew of acquisitions. There’s never a dull week in the world of SaaS. With that said, let’s take a look at everything that you shouldn’t miss this week.
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News of the week
Cybersecurity company SentinelOne files to go public with 108\% revenue growth year-over-year
Cybersecurity firm SentinelOne has filed its IPO prospectus with SEC to list on the NYSE with the ticker symbol $S. For the quarter ending on April 30th, it announced revenue of $37.4million, which grew by 108 percent year-on-year.
KKR, CD&R near deal to buy Cloudera
Data-cloud company Cloudera will be taken private as private-equity firms KKR and Clayton Dubilier & Rice LLC have agreed to buy it. The duo will be paying $16 a share, making the acquisition price $5.3billion.
Prosus’s acquisition of Stack Overflow: our exciting next chapter
Yet another significant acquisition this week was Stack Overflow being acquired by Prosus, the South Africa-based company that has a significant share in fast-growing companies such as Tencent, and OLX. The deal has been pegged at $1.8billion.
GitLab acquires UnReview as it looks to bring more ML tools to its platform
GitLab, a popular DevOps platform, has announced the acquisition of UnReview. UnReview is a machine learning-based tool that tells software teams to find the best reviewers to check their code. While the terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, GitLab will integrate UnReview’s capability into its own code review workflow.
Flipkart co-founder’s consulting startup acquires Indian HR SaaS firm
Xto10x, a company started by Flipkart’s co-founder Binny Bansal has acquired performance management platform Dockabl. Dockabl helps companies in easily managing their employee reviews, feedback, OKRs, and more. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
Related read: Interview with Samarth Masson, Co-founder at Clink and Dockabl
Earnings corner
Zoom reports financial results for the first quarter of fiscal year 2022
Video conferencing software Zoom has announced that its first-quarter revenue increased 191 percent y-o-y to $956.2million. It also revealed that the number of customers contributing more than $100,000 in its revenues has increased by 160 percent to 1,999 versus the same period last year. For the entire fiscal year 2022, the company expects revenue between $3.975billion and $3.990billion.
Slack sees 39\% user growth as it beats Q1 expectations
Messaging software Slack reported its fiscal Q1 2022 earnings. The company disclosed that it achieved revenue of $273million, in comparison to analyst’s expectations of $265million. It is worth noting that this could be its last quarterly report independently, as it has been acquired by Salesforce.
C3.ai stock drops on fiscal Q4 beat, in-line revenue view
Industrialized machine learning company C3.ai announced its Q4 revenues which were in line with the analyst expectations. Its revenue grew by 26 percent year-over-year to $52.3million.
SaaS companies that got the funding this week
Software startup Outreach valued at $4.2billion in new funding
Sales intelligence startup Outreach has raised $200million in funding. Led by Premji Invest and Steadfast Capital Ventures, it’s now valued at $4.2billion.
AI-powered sales enablement platform Gong raises $250million
Sales enablement platform Gong closed a $250million Series E funding round. With an impressive valuation of $7.25billion, the company will be using the amount for product development, hiring, and customer acquisition. The funding was led by Franklin Templeton in participation with existing investors.
Cognigy raises $44million to scale its enterprise-focused conversational AI platform
Cognigy offers low-code tools to help companies integrate AI capabilities to their customer service processes. The startup has nabbed $44million Series B funding led by Insight Partners.
LambdaTest raises $16million in series B funding led by Sequoia India
Browser-testing platform LambdaTest has announced $16million funding round as part of its Series B funding. The fund infusion has just come in six months after it raised $6million, and was led by Sequoia India.
Must reads
The role of product marketing — and why startups need to define it
What do Salesforce, HubSpot, Asana and Elastic all have in common? They’re all accelerating
Listen to
Ramp’s Eric Glyman on why you should never take the highest price, working with venture funds vs crossover funds and how to determine what to buy vs build as a founder today?
Ramp is among the fastest-growing startups, having raised over $390million in a short span of time. In this episode, its founder and CEO Eric Glyman shares his journey into the world of startups, how he makes decisions, his fund-raising strategy, and how to manage boards, among others.
Jürgen Spangl (Atlassian): better meetings = better collaboration
Atlassian is a SaaS pioneer, and in this podcast, listen to its CXO Jürgen Spangl sharing about why culture matters. He also shares the principles that drive everyone at Atlassian, and then he focuses on how to conduct better meetings.
How to take on huge incumbents as a solo founder with Derrick Reimer of SavvyCal
SavvyCal is an appointment scheduling software, a category which has suddenly become red-hot. In this episode, its founder Derrick Reimer shares his playbook of taking on the incumbents such as Calendly. He discusses his failed attempt of taking on Slack, and how that helped him to create a niche with his latest venture.
Watch
How To buy a SaaS company to grow MRR (using the bolt-on acquisition strategy)
You don’t have to always build a SaaS company from scratch. With a lot of interesting SaaS startups created as a side hustle or by solo founders, you can also acquire them and turbo-boost them. That’s what this video talks about as Dan Martell shares about a method called the bolt-on acquisition strategy.
