Fundings & Exits

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Why the $3.7 billion AppDynamics acquisition happened right before IPO

appdynamics Applications management company AppDynamics was just wrapping up the final touches on its initial public offering when it learned that Cisco was interested in discussing a potential deal. Preliminary talks were abandoned in November, but the discussion just picked up again last week. The deal was announced today and the IPO was slated to price tomorrow. Although many companies seek… Read More

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LiquiGlide raises $16 million to get every last drop out of packages or tanks

Ketchup falls freely out of a bottle featuring LiquiGlide's slippery coating. If you think it’s frustrating trying to get that last drop of ketchup out of the bottle, or toothpaste out of the tube, imagine having to waste and clean valuable and sticky substances from pipes or tanks in a factory. A startup called LiquiGlide has raised $16 million in a new round of venture funding to bring its patented slippery coatings to manufacturers around the world. Co-founded… Read More

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EquipmentShare, the Airbnb of construction, raises $26 million

EquipmentShare facilitates peer to peer rentals of heavy equipment. It hasn’t even been a year since EquipmentShare raised a Series A round of funding, but the “Airbnb of construction rentals,” has closed a $26 million Series B round. The Columbia, Missouri-based startup helps contractors rent out their under-utilized equipment, or rent safety tested equipment that they need from a fellow contractor. Last year, EquipmentShare also launched… Read More

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FLYR raised $8 million to change the way we buy plane tickets

Photo: Getty Images/ipopba/iStock Travel tech startup FLYR raised $8 million in Series A funding for technology that predicts the price of airfare by applying artificial intelligence to a database of both open industry data and a proprietary collection of years of past prices and fluctuations. The funding round was led by a Peter Thiel fund, and, according to an SEC filing, Thiel Capital principal Phin Upham was involved in… Read More

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How to fail at Kickstarter — even if you get funded

money-pit Originally positioned as a medium for projects to garner modest seed funding from a diverse group of supporters, crowdfunding platforms have evolved. Yes, crowdfunding has produced some inspiring success stories. However, it also has facilitated the transfer of significant sums of money to teams that ultimately proved themselves to be incompetent, leaving backers with nothing. Read More

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Quixey alums launch Sigma, a platform to bring merits and certifications online

sigma-team-pic A new company named Sigma, founded by alumni of mobile app search engine Quixey, aims to take records and certifications currently trapped in the analog world and bring them online. To do so, the company has raised $4.35 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz and other investors. The idea originated in late 2014, during a scuba trip in Belize that Sigma cofounder and… Read More

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Meet Alchemist’s class XIV startups making everything from smart beer taps to a faster internet

Dataplace, Alblasserdam Enterprise tech startups unveiled their products and pitched investors at Alchemist Accelerator’s 14th demo day in Santa Clara, Calif. today. The companies ranged from a Stanford AI labs spinout, Eloquent Labs, to the hardware-makers like Amber Agriculture and PubInno, to lots of software-as-a-service and cybersecurity developers, more like you’d expect from an… Read More

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With a $1.5M seed round, Eloquent Labs mixes AI and Mechanical Turk to fix customer service

widget_on_store Keenon Werling would be the first to agree that conversational AI is regularly overhyped. So instead of taking the traditional approach and gloating about a glitzy new deeper learning algorithm to pitch his new venture Eloquent Labs, Werling instead opted to differentiate by optimizing something far more low-tech, people. The startup’s special sauce is embracing a mix of AI,… Read More

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Oracle boosts cloud offering with Apiary API management tool acquisition

Oracle Office Buildings at Silicon Valley Headquarters (Photo by ?? Christopher J. Morris/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images) Oracle acquired API management startup Apiary today for an undisclosed amount. Apiary, which launched in 2011 and has raised a modest $8.5 million, helps companies manage APIs, which is an increasingly important job. As every company becomes a software company, they are building platforms and providing ways for customers and third-parties to build applications using their technologies.… Read More

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Yext hires new president as it looks to IPO

attending the Yext Launch Party at 1 Madison Ave., NY on Oct 1, 2015 Photo By: (Ken Arcara/Guest of a Guest) Yext, the company that helps businesses make sure that their location data appears correctly in search results, is announcing that Jim Steele will be joining the company full-time as president and chief revenue officer. Steele was previously on the board at Yext and was most recently at InsideSales. “I found a new younger Mark Benioff and I’m really excited,” Steele says… Read More

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