While this week may seem slow on news, it did have significant announcements as well as fundraising activities. We’re also seeing more SaaS companies being listed publicly, or planning to list soon. Let’s take a look at everything you shouldn’t miss this week.
Table of Contents
News of the week
HPE expands GreenLake with new cloud services, silicon on demand and more
HP Enterprise has announced a lot of features for Greenlake, a platform aimed at delivering everything-as-a-service. They include workload optimization, Silicon on-demand partnership with Intel, and vertical industry cloud services, among others.
The company also announced a partnership with Nutanix for introducing a managed database service.
Chinese SaaS Infobird: actively trying for transition, neutral due to uncertainty
Chinese cloud computing service company Infobird listed on NASDAQ in April 2021, while raising $21.8million. Within the first day itself, its share price shot up by 50 percent, but now the stock is at IPO level.
Salesforce, AWS expand partnership with pre-built apps, multiple native integrations for developers
SaaS pioneer Salesforce and cloud leader Amazon Web Services are deepening their partnership to allow developers to use the latter inside Salesforce. The companies also mentioned that they’ll combine AWS services for voice, AI, and video along with Salesforce Customer 360.
SaaS companies that got the funding this week
Software design startup Figma is now worth $10billion
Figma has been seeing exponential growth. Just last year, it had announced a $50million funding, and now it has raised $200million. With a valuation of $10billion, the UX software company will be spending on hiring by trebling its employee count.
Call center software firm Aircall tops $1billion valuation
Another SaaS company joins the unicorn club as call center software Aircall closes a $120million funding round. Led by Goldman Sachs, the company mentioned that it plans to go public in the next two years.
Classplus raises $65 million from Tiger Global, others
EdTech startup Classplus has closed a Series C round at $65million. The round was led by Tiger Global. It shared that it’s currently service over a lakh tutors across 1,500 cities in India serving over 20million students.
Oyster, an HR platform for distributed workforces, snaps up $50million on a $475million valuation
HR platform Oyster provides a whole suite of activities such as hiring, onboarding, payroll, salary management, etc. for employees outside of an organization’s headquarter country. It has gotten $50million Series B funding led by Stripes.
Tonkean raises $50million to expand its workflow automation platform
No-code workflow automation software Tonkean has received $50million in funding in a Series B round. Led by Accel, the fund infusion will be used for scaling the hiring efforts.
Must reads
The 2 types of SaaS pricing localization (and when to use them)
The secret 3-step master plan to cure healthcare
Listen to
Getting a big exit by being a small player in a small pond with Chris Bakke of Interviewed
Chris Bakke sold his company Interviewed for $50million to Indeed when it was doing $2million ARR. In this podcast, he shares his journey, how they were able to grow in a niche market, and then he talks about his current startup dubbed Laskie.
Mikael Thuneberg CEO, Supermetrics – the amazing story of bootstraping to 36m Euro ARR!
Europe-based Supermetrics has been a huge success story. The marketing data management and analysis tool was founded in 2013, and remained bootstrapped for a long time until it raised €40million last year. Listen to its CEO Mikael Thuneberg as he shares the story behind starting up, how they focused on product-led growth, and more.
Salesforce Service Cloud CEO, Clara Shih on how customer service became strategic overnight
In this episode, Salesforce Service Cloud’s Clara Shih shares why customer service is important. She shares her own story, and then shares tips as to how a company can focus on it.
Watch
Micro SaaS ideas (a guide to building a profitable startup in 2021)
As we’ve mentioned in top SaaS trends to look out for in 2021, micro SaaS will continue to grow. In this video, host TK Kader shares three principles to know for developing a micro SaaS idea, and how to grow it.
