Fintech Start-up OfBusiness Raises $29 Million in Funding Round
Gurgaon, India - 19th July 2018 - OfBusiness, a startup that finances small and medium enterprises (SMEs), has raised Rs 200 crore (US$29.18 million) in series-C funding round, led by US-based Creation Investments and Falcon Edge. Existing investors, Matrix Partners and Zodius Capital, also participated in the round. OfBusiness Co-founder and CEO, Asish Mohapatra, says the new funds will help the start-up boost its loan book by shoring up debt. To-date, Ofbusiness has raised a total of Rs 500 crore in equity and debt funding. The start-up assists its customers with raw material fulfillment and a new opportunities platform — BidAssist. It underwrites loans by evaluating the financial data of the SME, and also by checking the proprietary data contributed by the SME community of buyers and sellers.
https://www.ofbusiness.com/news
SAP Announces Second Quarter and Half-Year 2018 Results
Walldorf, Germany - SAP SE has announced its financial results for the second quarter 2018, which ended on 30th June. Cloud business has risen 30% (IFRS) and 40% (non-IFRS at constant currencies) and is outpacing competition. New cloud bookings are up 29% on top of a strong prior year quarter. Operating profit also shows continued double-digit improvement - Up 13% (IFRS) and Up 12% (Non-IFRS at Constant Currencies). The positive results mean a raised outlook for the remainder of 2018 as well as 2020 ambition. CFO, Luka Mucic, said, “This quarter is exemplary for the road we have chosen: rapidly transforming the company to the cloud while substantially growing profits and margins. I am very confident that this momentum will continue to expand. That’s why we raised our 2018 outlook and 2020 ambition.”
https://news.sap.com/2018/07/sap-announces-second-quarter-and-half-year-2018-results/
Zaggle Acquires Online Payments Start-up Click & Pay
Digital payments and cashback company Zaggle has acquired online payments start-up Click & Pay in a cash and stock deal. After completion of the deal, Click & Pay’s 25-member team will join Zaggle’s 150+ team. This acquisition will help Zaggle develop an expense management system that will add value to its users, leveraging the services provided by Zaggle. Talking about the partnership, Click & Pay Founder and CEO, Kalyan Karteek, said, “This partnership would help create a vibrant corporate ecosystem where millions of corporates get the opportunity of consolidating and centralizing all travel, health and entertainment billings that help keep a tab on expenses,”.
https://www.zaggle.in/
UK based, Software Firm, Ideagen Delivers 9th Consecutive Year of Positive Results Nottinghamshire, UK – 17th July 2018 - Total revenue was £36.1m, up 33% on the 2017 figure of £27.1m, with organic growth accounting for 11% of that increase. Adjusted EBITDA was £11m, a 40% increase on the 2017 figure of £7.9m and adjusted profit before tax (PBT) was also up 40% at £9.7m v £6.9m last financial year. Revenue from SaaS (cloud-based software services) rose by 76% to £8.4m from £4.8m in 2017. Operational highlights during the year included the acquisition of US-based Medforce Technologies Ltd, which added 300 US healthcare customers, strong intellectual property and recurring revenues. The acquisition also provided the company with a platform for further growth in North America. Ideagen also announced that the company had benefitted from strong international growth, particularly in its SaaS offerings, with 78% of all new SaaS logo wins coming from outside of the UK while SaaS bookings in total experienced a 174% rise.
https://www.ideagen.com/company/news/ideagen-delivers-9th-consecutive-year-of-growth/
Slack Acquires Missions So Non-Tech Teams Can Streamline Work
Denver - 17th July 2018 – In an attempt to broaden its appeal to businesses, Slack has acquired Denver-based software start-up, Missions. Slack has declined to reveal financial terms of the deal, which is its third acquisition. Missions is a start-up with fewer than 10 staff, but Brian Elliott, Vice President and General Manager of the Slack platform, described the deal as an acquisition rather than an acqui-hire, in which companies typically buy smaller companies for the talent. Slack will not be reassigning its new employees, who started work at Slack this week in its Denver office, to different Slack product development teams, Elliott said. Instead Missions will continue developing its product within Slack. The simple yet powerful tool automates everyday tasks without the need to code.
https://slack.com/press
Google's Job Search Platform Comes to the UK
16th July 2018 - Google has secured Some of the UK's largest recruitment services - Reed, Guardian Jobs, Haymarket and Totaljobs.com –to add their job listings to the UK-version of its job search tool. The service automatically lists the newest and most relevant job openings, matched to the user's location when they type relevant terms into Google Search.
The US tech giant is currently offering the facility free of charge to recruiters to feature their listings nor using the service to place any extra adverts beyond those that normally appear within its results. In a blog announcing the job-matching service, Joy Xi, Product Manager, Search, explained that it’s there to assist employers who are experiencing a shortage of appropriate talent as well as those looking for a new job. Audible alerts across all devices can help individuals stay in touch of new job releases as they happen.
https://www.blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/helping-more-people-uk-find-their-next-job/
Blume, BGV, and Emergent Ventures Launch B2B Accelerator Fund Arka Venture Labs
In a fresh attempt to support the cross-border growth of start-ups, venture capital firm Blume Ventures, has joined with two US-based funds to launch a B2B accelerator platform-cum-fund. The two US-based funds are: Benhamou Global Ventures (BGV) and Emergent Ventures. Together with Blume, they will launch Arka Venture Labs, whose venture capital fund will invest solely in B2B start-ups in India with the aim of facilitating global transition and faster growth. The platform is open only to B2B start-ups with a minimum viable product (MVP) and strong potential in the US or in Europe, backed by strong core technology and economic differentiators. Arka Venture Labs will operate out of Blume’s offices in India and BGV’s offices in Silicon Valley. Apart from mentoring and funding, the platform also provides working spaces for these startups
https://inc42.com/buzz/blume-launches-arka-venture-labs-with-two-us-firms-to-support-cross-border-growth-of-indian-startups/
Restaurant booking startup Eatigo chows down ~$10M more from TripAdvisor
Founded in Bangkok in 2013, Eatigo is a Southeast Asia-based dining service that was designed to help restaurants fill unused covers by offering deals to customers at certain times of the day. The appeal to eaters is obvious, but Eatigo also encourages restaurants to manage their inventory and time to fill their quieter times for additional revenue. Eatigo is currently present in six countries, with over 4,000 restaurants signed up and four million registered users. The restaurants range from ‘top-end’ right down to street food outlets. With the new funding from TripAdvisor, (already an investor) further growth is predicted. The funding amount has not been disclosed but sources close to the company say it is in the region of $10 million. Indeed, Eatigo CEO and co-founder Michael Cluzel, confirmed the figure is in ‘eight-digits’ and takes Eatigo to over $25 million in capital raised to date.
https://tripadvisor.mediaroom.com/US-press-releases
Netskope Acquires Sift Security
12th July 2018 - Netskope, a company that focuses on security in the cloud, announced today it has acquired Sift Security, a start-up launched in 2014 to help secure cloud infrastructure services. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Sift uses machine learning to provide breach detection and automated response for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) environments, even across multiple clouds, while Netskope provides comprehensive cloud and website security from a single interface. Netskope founder and CEO, Sanjay Beri, said in an announcement about the acquisition, that Sift enhances Netskope’s ability to uniquely gather and visualize the richest set of contextualized data about transactions across nearly all of the services provided by the Netskope Security Cloud — including transaction visibility, DLP (data loss prevention), threat protection, adaptive access control and anomaly detection.
https://www.netskope.com/blog/welcoming-sift-security-to-netskope/
Capita announces the disposal of ParkingEye for £235 Million
12th July 2018 – Capita has announced that it has reached an agreement to sell its parking management business, ParkingEye, to a vehicle owned by Macquarie and funds advised by MML Capital Partners for a cash consideration of £235m. The transaction is in line with Capita’s strategy of simplifying the business, focusing on growth markets and disposing of non-core components. ParkingEye’s underlying revenue and operating profit were £40m and £14m respectively in the year to 31 December 2017 and the business had gross assets of £22m. The cash proceeds will be used to reduce net indebtedness. Jon Lewis, Chief Executive Officer, Capita, said “This transaction marks a further step in executing the strategy announced in April aimed at simplifying and strengthening the business to deliver future success. Together with the four disposals already completed this year, we now expect to raise more than £400m from non-core disposals in 2018, well ahead of our target of £300m.”
https://www.capita.com/news/news/2018/capita-announces-the-disposal-of-parkingeye/
Broadcom to Acquire CA Technologies for $18.9 Billion in Cash
San Jose, CA and New York, NY – 11th July 2018 – Broadcom Inc, a semiconductor device supplier to the wired, wireless, enterprise storage and industrial end markets, and CA Technologies, a provider of information technology (IT) management software and solutions, have announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Broadcom has agreed to acquire CA to build one of the world’s leading infrastructure technology companies. Comment around the acquisition has been generally negative but, earlier this week, analyst, Piper Jaffray observed, “It may end up being one of Broadcom’s best acquisitions over the last several years," contradicting Wall Street's consensus that the chipmaker's bid for a software company doesn't make sense.
https://www.ca.com/us/company/newsroom/press-releases/2018/broadcom-to-acquire-ca-technologies-for-18-9-billion-in-cash.html
Box Acquires Butter.ai - Enhances Intelligent Search Capabilities
San Francisco - 10th July 2018 - Box has announced that it has acquired Butter.ai, a start-up that helps customers search for content intelligently in the cloud. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Butter.AI was founded by Jack Hirsch and Adam Walz, two ex-Evernote employees and partly funded by Evernote founder and former CEO, Phil Libin’s Turtle Studios. Box has been adding intelligence to its platform for some time and this acquisition increases their machine learning and artificial intelligence functions as well as enhancing search inside of the Box product. Box’s Jeetu Patel announced the acquisition in a blog post: “By bringing intelligent experiences to Box, our customers will be able to extract key information from their content, enabling businesses to uncover insights, work faster and smarter and reimagine their business processes.” https://blog.box.com/blog/welcome-butter-ai-team-Box/
