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Contentful raises $33.5M for its headless CMS platform

Contentful, a Berlin- and San Francisco-based startup that provides content management infrastructure for companies like Spotify, Nike, Lyft and others, today announced that it has raised a $33.5 million Series D funding round led by Sapphire Ventures, with participation from OMERS Ventures and Salesforce Ventures, as well as existing investors General Catalyst, Benchmark, Balderton Capital and Hercules. In total, the company has now raised $78.3 million.

It’s been less than a year since the company raised its Series C round and, as Contentful co-founder and CEO Sascha Konietzke told me, the company didn’t really need to raise right now. “We had just raised our last round about a year ago. We still had plenty of cash in our bank account and we didn’t need to raise as of now,” said Konietzke. “But we saw a lot of economic uncertainty, so we thought it might be a good moment in time to recharge. And at the same time, we already had some interesting conversations ongoing with Sapphire [formerly SAP Ventures] and Salesforce. So we saw the opportunity to add more funding and also start getting into a tight relationship with both of these players.”

The original plan for Contentful was to focus almost explicitly on mobile. As it turns out, though, the company’s customers also wanted to use the service to handle its web-based applications and these days, Contentful happily supports both. “What we’re seeing is that everything is becoming an application,” he told me. “We started with native mobile application, but even the websites nowadays are often an application.”

In its early days, Contentful focused only on developers. Now, however, that’s changing, and having these connections to large enterprise players like SAP and Salesforce surely isn’t going to hurt the company as it looks to bring on larger enterprise accounts.

Currently, the company’s focus is very much on Europe and North America, which account for about 80 percent of its customers. For now, Contentful plans to continue to focus on these regions, though it obviously supports customers anywhere in the world.

Contentful only exists as a hosted platform. As of now, the company doesn’t have any plans for offering a self-hosted version, though Konietzke noted that he does occasionally get requests for this.

What the company is planning to do in the near future, though, is to enable more integrations with existing enterprise tools. “Customers are asking for deeper integrations into their enterprise stack,” Konietzke said. “And that’s what we’re beginning to focus on and where we’re building a lot of capabilities around that.” In addition, support for GraphQL and an expanded rich text editing experience is coming up. The company also recently launched a new editing experience.

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French IoT startup Sigfox confirms €150M Series E at €600M valuation

sigfox-logo Sigfox, the IoT company based out of France that is building a dedicated, global network to connect, monitor and control devices like smart-home alarms, machinery, refrigerators and city streetlights, today confirmed that it has closed its latest round of funding, a Series E round of €150 million ($160 million). We broke the news of this round in October, noting it was likely to be… Read More

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Talkdesk Call Center Software “Growing Like Crazy”

Cristina Fonseca (Talkdesk) (2 of 6) Talkdesk co-founder Cristina Fonseca spoke at Disrupt London on Tuesday. In an interview with TechCrunch’s Matt Lynley, Fonseca explained how the Portugal-based startup has helped businesses improve their customer service experience.
Founded in 2011, in an effort to win a Macbook Air contest, Talkdesk has quickly scaled its call center business. Its software is used by companies like… Read More

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Guru, With $2.7 Million In Funding, Simplifies Internal Knowledge Sharing

guru Given the speed at which startups often grow, disseminating important information to the folks that need it (when they need it) can become a huge hurdle. Guru, started by Boomi founder Rick Nucci, aims to solve that problem. Guru is a Chrome web extension that sits on top of pretty much anything you do on your computer, and intelligently surfaces the relevant information about your startup… Read More

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Apttus Enjoys A $108M Round As Business Grows Leaps And Bounds

Salesman discusses terms with customer. Just a couple of years ago Apttus, a quote-to-cash SaaS company built on top of Salesforce.com, had a couple of hundred employees. Today it has 900 and projects more than 1,000 by the end of the year. And it’s not hiring all of those bodies for nothing. The company’s year-over-year growth is in the 60 percent range. While not willing to provide an exact figure, it claims to have… Read More

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Predictive Analytics Firm InsideSales.com Gets $60M With Salesforce, Microsoft Strategic Backers

data While people believe that the tech world is in a bubble that is bound to pop soon, the investment climate for enterprise startups with good traction remains hot. In the latest development, InsideSales.com, a provider of predictive analytics services for salespeople to help them source and close deals, has raised another $60 million of funding. This latest round, which brings the total… Read More

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