While we say this every week, the past seven days were quite ‘newsy’ in the world of SaaS. From Salesforce reportedly in talks to buy Slack to Kahoot making its fourth acquisition with Drops – there’s a lot to unpack this week. So without any more delay, let’s get into it.
Table of Contents
News of the week
Salesforce is in advanced talks to buy Slack Technologies
This is definitely the biggest news, so much so that it resulted in an increase in Slack’s share price, while Salesforce shares saw a dip in price. While it may not make direct sense as to how the leading CRM provider will leverage collaboration software Slack, many experts suggest that this is like Microsoft’s playbook to use Teams to get users to try its Dynamics CRM. Well, we have to see whether this acquisition plays out and how it changes the industry.
Related tweets: https://twitter.com/gregg_johnson/status/1332014286999150592 | https://twitter.com/jasonlk/status/1332031678320033792
Improving Google Meet attendance reports and making them available to more customers
We’ve to give credit to Google to continuously update its video conferencing offering. Google Meet now offers better attendance reports for not just education meetings, but all kinds of users as well. The admin will also have control over tracking and report creation.
VMware tops Q3 estimates, raises fiscal year guidance
Dell-owned VMWare announced its latest quarterly results, and mentioned that its SaaS revenue increased by 44 percent from the same period last year. And that’s not it, it also accounted for 24 percent of the company’s revenue.
Chargebee and Pipe partner to supercharge SaaS growth
Subscription management platform Chargebee has joined hands with Pipe, a company that provides upfront funding to SaaS companies basis their MRR without any debt or equity. The partnership does make sense as Chargebee can provide the relevant data to Pipe.
Kahoot drops $50million on Drops to add language learning to its gamified education stable
Gamification software Kahoot has acquired Drops – a startup that helps one learn languages with the help of pictures and words – for $50million. Kahoot has been moving from strength to strength this year, be it getting a $215million funding from Softbank or acquiring companies.
SaaS companies that got the funding this week
Meet the startups of Surge 04 2020
Sequoia’s early-stage startup program Surge has announced its fourth cohort. Out of 17 startups, half of them are in the SaaS space, including Epsilo, LambdaTest, Let’s Dive, and more.
Shipsy, which is also a part of this batch, has raised $6million from Surge and Ingo Edge. The logistics platform helps customers manage their end-to-end operations.
YC-backed Cashfree raises $35.3million for its payments platform
Another Indian company finds its name in the list this week as it has raised $35.3million. Cashfree, a payment gateway software, has received the Series B funding led by Apis Partners. It’ll be using the funding to build cross-border payments solutions.
Boulevard’s Series B financing: onward, together.
Spa and salon management software Boulevard has nabbed a $27million Series B funding. Led by Index Ventures and Toba Capital, the company will use the money to expand across the US.
Metigy gets $20 million AUD to make online marketing easier for SMEs
Metigy, a social media management software, has gotten $20million AUD (roughly $14.6million) Series B funding. It was led by Cygnet Capital and will allow the company to expand its presence in the US and Southeast Asia.
Salesforce puts money into AppsFlyer
Ad attribution tool AppsFlyer had announced its Series D funding in January this year. And now it has extended that funding to $225million, thanks to the infusion from Salesforce Ventures.
Cast.ai nabs $7.7M seed to remove barriers between public clouds
Instead of being stuck with one cloud provider, wouldn’t it be convenient to use different cloud services for the particular use case? That’s what Cast.ai enables, as it uses the cloud provider based on your requirements and budget, without you worrying about the back end.
We don’t hear much about the funding of open-source projects. But ERPNext proves to be an anomaly, as it has been able to raise $1.35million from Zerodha. ERPNext is aimed at providing businesses a free, fully customizable ERP platform.
Must reads
Can Shopify compete with Amazon without becoming Amazon?
6 things I wish I knew before I bootstrapped my first SaaS startup
A simplified method for forecasting MRR growth
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