Fundings & Exits
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YC-Backed Outbound Helps Businesses Message Customers Over Both Email And Mobile
With the shift to mobile devices, businesses today have a need to reach their customers wherever they are – and that includes marketing to their customers outside of email alone. A Y Combinator-backed startup called Outbound wants to help today’s marketers run campaigns that go beyond just tracking “opens and clicks,” and can also reach customers using… Read More
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Vanhawks Raises $1.6M To Help Put The Valour Smartbike On The Road
Smartbike startup Vanhawks, part of the Y Combinator Winter 2015 class, has raised $1.6 million from Real Ventures, Olympic triathlon gold medallist Simon Whitfield, Brenda Irwin of Relentless Pursuit partners and various angels. The company will use the funding to help deliver its Valour smartbike, which raised over $820,000 on Kickstarter last year, to its first customers starting this spring. Read More
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IBM Watson Group Buys AlchemyAPI To Enhance Machine Learning Capabilities
IBM Watson, the artificial intelligence platform made famous by beating the three best Jeopardy! champions ever several years ago, bought Denver-based AlchemyAPI today. It did not reveal the purchase price. The acquisition gives Watson a key piece of machine learning technology. The deal also gives it access to community of over 40,000 AlchemyAPI developers, who are building cognitive… Read More
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PayPal Buys Paydiant, The Mobile Wallet Behind CurrentC, To Raise Its Game v. Google + Apple
PayPal, the payments service with 162 million users preparing to separate from e-commerce giant eBay later this year, is announcing an acquisition today to help build out its mobile business targeting physical merchants, and sharpen its focus in competition with other tech payment hopefuls like Apple and Google.
It is buying Paydiant, a startup out of Boston that makes mobile wallet… Read More
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With A $60M Revenue Run Rate, ClassPass May Be The Next Uber
TechCrunch has secured financial information about ClassPass, the TechStars-backed startup that offers unlimited access to various fitness classes for a flat monthly fee. As it stands now, our sources report that ClassPass is tracking to a $60 million revenue run rate for 2015, a run rate that has doubled in the past three months. Last week alone, the company brought in $1.5 million and this… Read More
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Visa Announces Acquisition Of TrialPay To Expand Its Offers Platform
Visa announced today that it’s planning to acquire Mountain View-based TrialPay, an e-commerce payment platform which sits in between payments and advertising, providing consumers with an alternative way to pay for items by agreeing to take advantage of another merchant’s offer. For example, in mobile applications, TrialPay allows gamers to unlock premium content by agreeing to… Read More
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YC-Backed YesGraph Raises A Million To Build A Better Referral System For Mobile Apps
When launching a new consumer application, especially those in the social space, many developers today rely on an invite mechanism that has the app’s initial user base reaching out and recommending the app to their friends. But today, these invite systems are often fairly basic – they connect to a phone’s address book and then force the user to sift through their hundreds… Read More
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Hiring SaaS Platform Workable Raises Another $5M
Workable has secured $5 million in additional funding from its existing investors, including Greylock Israel (which has since become 83North) and Greece-based seed investors Openfund. Workable enables smaller companies to post to multiple jobs boards, review candidates and schedule interviews. Read More
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Branch Metrics Raises $15 Million For Its Smarter Mobile Deep Linking Technology
Palo Alto-based Branch Metrics, one of the many companies focused on developing better mobile deep linking technology – that is, links that point users to specific pages within mobile applications themselves – is announcing today the close of its $15 million Series A round of funding, led by existing investor New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and TriplePoint Capital President Ben… Read More
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Webdata Solutions Raises $4.5M To Let E-Commerce Companies Monitor Competitors
Leipzig, Germany-based Webdata Solutions is another startup playing in the retail intelligence space. The company, founded in 2012 as a spin-off from a Leipzig University research project, provides a big data-based service, called Blackbee, that crawls the web in real-time to enable retailers and manufacturers to keep a better tab on competitors and take action accordingly. Read More
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