High interest rates and financial pressures make it more important than ever for finance teams to have a better handle on their cash flow, and several startups are hoping to help. Two-year-old Israeli startup Panax is one, and it just raised a $10 million Series A round of funding led by Team8, with participation from […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Digital banking startup Mercury is layering software onto its bank accounts, giving its business customers the ability to pay bills, invoice customers and reimburse employees, the company has told TechCrunch exclusively. The additional features puts the company in even more direct competition with the likes of Brex and Ramp, two rival fintechs that have for […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Sona, a workforce management platform for frontline employees, has raised $27.5 million in a Series A round of funding. More than two-thirds of the U.S. workforce are reportedly in frontline jobs, which might be anything from customer service and healthcare to retail environments and hospitality. But managing this vast workforce, ensuring roles are filled and […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
High interest rates and financial pressures make it more important than ever for finance teams to have a better handle on their cash flow, and several startups are hoping to help. Two-year-old Israeli startup Panax is one, and it just raised a $10 million Series A round of funding led by Team8, with participation from […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As DocuSign reportedly explores a sale to private equity, it’s acquiring a company itself.
On Monday, DocuSign announced that it’s buying Lexion, a contract workflow automation startup, for $165 million. The purchase comes as DocuSign makes increasing investments in the contract management space, most recently launching DocuSign IAM, a service aimed at connecting different components of the corporate agreement creation and negotiation process.
Lexion was incubated at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), the AI-focused research arm of the nonprofit Allen Institute. Oberoi founded the company together with former Microsoft research software development engineering lead Emad Elwany and engineering veteran James Baird; Oberoi previously co-founded survey platform Precision Polling, which SurveyMonkey acquired shortly after it launched.
Lexion began as a “smart” repository for contracts, letting legal teams ask natural language questions about documents. But it slowly expanded with tools to address various use cases and challenges in document creation for teams across not only legal departments, but sales, IT, HR and finance.
Lexion had raised $35.2 million in venture capital prior to the acquisition from investors including Khosla Ventures, Madrona, and Point72 Ventures.
According to DocuSign CEO Allan Thygesen, Legion’s technology will enable DocuSign customers to gain a “more granular” understanding of their contract structures and data, as well as better identify insights and potential risks. DocuSign will tap Lexion’s AI models for contract creation and negotiations, while Lexion will build integrations with DocuSign’s products and solutions.
The purchase comes at a pivotal moment for DocuSign, valued at about $12.5 billion, which is said to be in the process of selling itself to a private equity firm. Perhaps in a bid to make its books more attractive to suitors, DocuSign in February announced plans to lay off ~6% of its workforce — some 400 jobs.
Reuters reported in January that Bain and Hellman & Friedman are among the final bidders in an auction for DocuSign, which could be one of the biggest leveraged buyouts in 2024.
DocuSign’s other acquisitions include SpringCM (in July 2018 for $220 million), a cloud platform for sales contract management, and Seal Software (in February 2020 for $188 million), a company specializing in AI-driven contract analytics.
WSO2, a company that provides API management and identity and access management (IAM) services for enterprises, has been acquired by Swedish investment giant EQT.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but TechCrunch has learned via sources that the deal values WSO2 at “more than” $600 million, with EQT attaining a “significant majority” stake for the price.
WSO2’s products include an open-source API manager, comparable to something like Google’s Apigee, which businesses use for building and integrating all their digital services, either in the cloud or on-premises. The company offers tangential services such as API management specifically for Kubernetes, as well as its flagship Identity Server — a little something like Okta — that companies use for managing identity and access functionality in their apps, such as single sign-on (SSO).
WSO2, which was founded out of Sri Lanka in 2005, had raised around $130 million in funding from the likes of Intel, Cisco and Goldman Sachs, with its most recent tranche coming via a $93 million Series E round in 2022. An official valuation was never announced, but articles from some outlets at the time reported a valuation of more than $600 million. So that would mean WSO2 has remained somewhat stagnant, though the “more than” facet here could disguise some movement in the company’s valuation.
WSO2 co-founder and CEO Sanjiva Weerawarana has a strong tack record in the open-source sphere, particularly among Apache Software Foundation projects, and he was one of the main designers of the cloud-native Ballerina programming language. Since 2017, Weerawarana also drives for Uber, which he says is designed to “challenge the norm” and make it more socially acceptable in his native Sri Lanka.
WSO2 is a fairly well-distributed company, in keeping with the ethos of other businesses founded around open source. While the company counts a U.S. HQ in Santa Clara, and many of its senior leadership team are spread across the U.S., its center of gravity lies in Sri Lanka where much of its workforce is based — including Weerawarana, who’s based in the capital Colombo.
With that in mind, it’s worth noting that the acquisition was actually made by an EQT subsidiary called EQT Private Capital Asia, formerly known as Baring Private Equity Asia, which EQT procured in 2022 for €6.8 billion to serve as its private equity vehicle for Asia.
With a global spread of customers that include AT&T, Honda and Axa, this is something that EQT Private Capital Asia partner Hari Gopalakrishnan says was a key part of its decision to invest. Moreover, with cloud computing and AI driving demand for security infrastructure, WSO2 was a particularly appealing proposition for an investment firm with recent form in the enterprise software space.
“Software is a key focus sector for EQT, and WSO2 is a strong company that has scaled globally with an enterprise customer base spread across the US and Europe,” Gopalakrishnan said in a statement. “[We] believe that the company is well-positioned to capitalize on long-term trends such as digital transformation and rising GenAI adoption.”
EQT say that it expects the acquisition to close in the second half of 2024.
At its Team ’24 event in Las Vegas, Atlassian today announced that it is combining Jira Software with Jira Service Management into a single product under the ‘Jira’ brand.
The origins of Jira, Atlassian’s flagship project management tool, are in software development and issue tracking for developers, but throughout the past few years, the company started to launch Jira versions for other teams as well. These included Jira Work Management for business teams like marketing, sales and human resources, which launched in 2021 and replaced a previous product called Jira Core.
“We believe great teams are built on a foundation of shared goals, coordinated work, and free-flowing information across functions,” writes Dave Meyer, the head of product for Jira, in today’s announcement. “That’s why the latest evolution of Jira offers a shared place for every team to align on goals and priorities, track and collaborate on work, and get the insights they need to build something incredible, together. We’ve taken the best of Jira Work Management and Jira Software to make a single project management tool ready to help any team go from good to great.”
The idea here is to offer a cross-functional tool that allows different teams inside a company to more easily collaborate and track their work. While there were already connections between Jira Software and Jira Work Management (plus Work Management is already included in every Jira subscription for free), Atlassian says that this combined version will reduce friction and help different teams align on common goals, no matter whether they are engineers, marketers or designers, for example.
It’s worth noting that Jira Service Management for IT teams is not affected by this change.
With this change, Atlassian is also bringing a number of new features to Jira to enable this kind of collaboration. Unsurprisingly, these include several new AI-based tools.
Maybe the most interesting of these is the new AI work breakdown (coming to Jira and Jira Premium users soon), which can help teams break down their epics into individual issues (or issues into sub-tasks) automatically — with the ability to edit them manually, too, of course. That takes away some of the grunt project management work and will free up project managers to focus on the bigger-picture items on their to-do lists.
Soon, Jira will also be able to sum up issue comments automatically. This capability will also come to Confluence, Atlassian’s wiki-like workspace tool.
Currently, to become a Jira power user, you’ll need to learn the Jira Query Language (JQL) to search for issues on the platform. Now, thanks to the power of large language models, users will be able to use natural language to create these JQL queries.
And for those occasions where you don’t know exactly what to write, Atlassian is also introducing a new generative AI writing tool to Jira that can create, summarize and improve descriptions and comments. These same capabilities are also coming to Atlassian’s Trello and Bitbucket, with Jira Product Discovery and Confluence following soon.
Since the entire purpose of combining these two tools is to make collaboration easier, Jira is also getting a few new features that help teams align on their overall goals. That feature, imaginatively dubbed ‘Goals,’ will roll out in the coming month and aims to help users to “create goals in Jira’s list and issue views to visualize how each task maps to a higher objective.” There will also be a directory of goals and goal progress charts “where goals can be viewed in the context of your projects.”
Jira is also introducing a few new ways to work with issues and visualize them. You can now see every project in a spreadsheet-like list view, for example, and make in-line edits. Atlassian notes that this will also make bulk edits easier.
To better track complex projects, Jira Premium and Enterprise users now get access to the new ‘Plans’ feature, which allows users to track issues from different boards and projects in a single view.
“Now everyone – from leaders to program managers to team members – can estimate release dates for cross-team projects, answer staffing and resource questions, or map out yearly goals, all in a single view,” Meyer explains in today’s announcement.
Speaking of time, there is now also a new calendar view for tracking business projects with issues organized by due date. This, Meyer notes, will help business teams more easily align their work in sync with upcoming software releases. The full launch of this calendar feature is still a few months out, though.
French startup Carbonfact believes that the best carbon accounting solutions will focus on one vertical. That’s why the company has decided to provide a carbon management and reporting tool for the fashion industry exclusively.
And Carbonfact recently raised a $15 million funding round led by Alven, the French VC firm that led Carbonfact’s seed round in 2022 already. Other investors in the round include Headline and a follow-on investment from Y Combinator.
Big companies in the fashion industry (and other industries) need to come up with a carbon accounting strategy as regulation is changing in Europe and the U.S. with the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), California’s Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act and the NY Fashion Act.
That’s why there has been a boom in carbon accounting platforms. The biggest ones like Watershed, Persefoni, Sweep or Greenly have an industry-agnostic approach. They help you track your carbon emissions and create reports in a more or less automated way.
Just like Carbon Maps focuses exclusively on the food industry, Carbonfact is focusing on the fashion industry so that its product can be more granular and more specific.
“For these industries – food is a very good example, fashion is a very good example – you need to be accurate in your calculations and you need industry-specific tools to model virtual products and improve your product offering in the future,” Carbonfact co-founder and CEO Marc Laurent told me.
In more practical details, Carbonfact retrieves your existing data from your ERP and other internal systems. It then calculates the footprints for each product using a lifecycle assessment engine that is specifically designed for clothing items.
“[Clients] also have data in what they call PLM [Product Lifecycle Management software ] — that’s the software in which they put all the product data. This is where you’ll find the product recipe sheets. And they sometimes have data in traceability platforms, such as Retraced, Trustrace, Fairly Made in France, etc. And finally, they sometimes have data in Excel files,” Laurent said.
After centralizing and normalizing all data in a single platform, as the fashion industry relies on a cascade of suppliers, Carbonfact wants to help you calculate your scopes 1, 2 and 3 emissions — scope 3 emissions in particular encompass indirect emissions from third-party suppliers.
The startup first gives you a broad idea of your main emission hotspots with an uncertainty range. It then helps you prioritize data collection with your suppliers to refine your data and improve your carbon reporting.
After that, Carbonfact can become your carbon footprint dashboard. You can generate broad reports and drill down at an SKU-based level to see the environmental cost of each product. The platform can then be used to run what-if scenarios to see if you should change a material, move to a new country of manufacturing or change your transport methods.
Image Credits: Carbonfact
While many companies will focus first on CO2-equivalent metrics, Carbonfact can also be used to track other metrics, such as water consumption, French eco-labels and other environmental indicators — in the carbon accounting industry, they call these indicators the Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules, or PEFCR for short.
And Carbonfact has already onboarded over 150 apparel and footwear brands, including New Balance, Columbia, Carhartt and Allbirds. “We track 100% of their subsidiaries, 100% of their suppliers, 100% of their products,” Laurent said.
Each client pays tens of thousands of dollars per year to use Carbonfact. With a little back-of-the-envelope calculation, if we consider that a client pays around $20,000 per year on average, it means that the French startup already generates at least $3 million in annual recurring revenue.
It’s clear that sustainability management software is a growing segment in the world of enterprise software. But it’s also a young sector. So it’s going to be interesting to see if several industry-specific platforms can become large companies or if there will be some consolidation down the road.
RevenueCat, a top subscription management platform for apps that monetize via in-app purchases, is now flush with new capital as it expands to the web. The company has closed on a $12 million Series C led by Adjacent, following the launch of a new product, RevenueCat Billing, that allows web app developers to integrate subscription purchases into any website. Later, it will also support Roku.
The timing of the product’s launch is notable, as it arrives amid the implementation of the E.U.’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) regulation, which is forcing Apple to open up the iPhone and the App Store to new completion. As a result, Apple initially blocked iPhone web apps (Progressive Web Apps, or PWAs) in the E.U., likely fearing developers would abandon its App Store, before reversing that decision under regulatory pressure.
For RevenueCat, however, the changes ahead for iOS — not to mention Apple’s refusal to cut its default 15%-30% commission rate — mean there are now more developers who are looking to the web to monetize their apps.
“It could be for progressive web apps or any kind of customer that wants to take payments outside of the App Store,” explains RevenueCat CEO Jacob Eiting, of the new web billing product. “It’s going to play within all the new [DMA] rules…it’s going to be a pretty significant product expansion for us,” he said.
The company says it moved in this direction because of the inbound interest from developers. Even if they didn’t have a web app, many developers wanted to shift their customers to the web to pay.
Though Stripe already enables this functionality, what developers were lacking was a system that’s specifically designed for consumer subscription apps. Now, even if developers are processing payments through Stripe or others, they’re getting their data and insights in the same format and within the same dashboard where they already manage their in-app purchase data. This makes it easier for them to focus on how their subscription apps are monetizing, overall, regardless of where the payment comes from — web or mobile.
Though Apple has historically not allowed app developers to steer customers to the web from inside their iOS apps, it has permitted steering from other channels — like the developer’s website or emails to customers. The E.U.’s DMA rules should also permit developers to steer customers to the web from inside their mobile apps, too.
With RevenueCat Billing, essentially a web SDK, developers can accept subscription payments from any website. It joins other recent product releases like Paywall, Targeting, and Experiments, which are all designed to help developers grow their revenue. Today, RevenueCat powers subscriptions in over 30,000 apps and handles over $2 billion in subscriptions annually, it says.
The new Series C from Adjacent (led by Nico Wittenborn — a Series A investor, now board member) totals $12 million. Other investors include Y Combinator, Index Ventures, Volo Ventures, and SaaStr Fund. Ahead of this round, RevenueCat had raised $56 million, bringing its total raise to $68+ million.
In addition to fueling its new products, the fundraise will help RevenueCat expand to new markets, including Japan and South Korea.
“Our main competitor is ‘cobbling together monetization technology yourself’,” said RevenueCat CTO and co-founder Miguel Carranza, in a statement about the fundraise and expansions. “In the U.S., we’ve done a good job at educating developers, product people, marketers, and CEOs on the challenges of building in-house. In many other regions, it’s unfortunately still the default for businesses to sink valuable resources into something that provides zero differentiation or value for that business’s end users. We’re investing in those regions by expanding our support for languages and local currencies later this year, deepening our relationships with local technology partners and agencies, as well as hiring in-market where possible,” he added.
Image Credits: RevenueCat
RevenueCat is not yet a profitable company, but Eiting says that profitability is always on the horizon. The company still has the money it raised in 2021 and now has over $40 million in the bank in addition to around $20 million in ARR. It has also halved its burn rate since last summer.
“There’s so much stuff we can build by deploying capital and doing it on a profitable basis would just slow us down right now. So while there’s access to capital, which isn’t always the case…the best thing for our customers and investors is to take more capital and deploy it faster,” he told TechCrunch.
“RevenueCat is too important to too many apps to risk the company driving towards a financial cliff. This may be counter to the prevailing narrative of how venture-backed companies should be built, but our investors are aligned with us and know that Miguel and I are leading the company to maximize the value for developers. Investors make more money when developers make more money,” the CEO added in a blog post. “To that end, we’re still aiming to take the company public in this decade,” he said.
IBM wisely gravitated away from trying to be a pure cloud infrastructure vendor years ago, recognizing that it could never compete with the big three: Amazon, Microsoft and Google. It has since moved onto helping IT departments manage complex hybrid environments, using its financial clout to acquire a portfolio of high-profile companies.
It began with the $34 billion Red Hat acquisition in 2018, continued with the Apptio acquisition last year, and it kept it going on Wednesday when the company announced that it would be acquiring cloud management vendor HashiCorp for $6.4 billion.
With HashiCorp, Big Blue gets a set of cloud lifecycle management and security tools, and a company that is growing considerably faster than any of IBM’s other businesses — although the revenue is small by IBM standards: $155 million last quarter, up 15% over the prior year. That still makes it a healthy and growing business for IBM to add to its growing stable of hybrid cloud tools.
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna certainly sees the value of this piece to his company’s hybrid strategy, and he even threw in an AI reference for good measure. “HashiCorp has a proven track record of enabling clients to manage the complexity of today’s infrastructure and application sprawl. Combining IBM’s portfolio and expertise with HashiCorp’s capabilities and talent will create a comprehensive hybrid cloud platform designed for the AI era,” he said in a statement.
HashiCorp made headlines last year when it changed the license on its open source Terraform tool to be more friendly to the company. The community that helped build Terraform wasn’t happy and responded by launching a new open-source alternative called OpenTofu. HashiCorp recently accused the new community of misusing Terraform’s open-source code when it created the OpenTofu fork. Now that the company is part of IBM, it will be interesting to see if they continue to pursue this line of thinking.
It’s worth noting that Red Hat also made headlines last year when it changed its open-source licensing terms, also causing consternation in the open-source community. Perhaps these companies will fit well together, both from a software perspective and their shifting views on open source.
Just this week, the company introduced a new platform concept with the release of the Infrastructure Cloud, a concept that should fit nicely inside IBM’s hybrid cloud product catalog. While they didn’t add much in terms of functionality, it did unify the offerings under a single umbrella making it easier for sales and marketing to present to customers.
If IBM treats HashiCorp in a similar way to Red Hat, the company would maintain its independence inside the IBM family of products. AVOA, a research firm run by former CIO Tim Crawford, says the company would be wise to keep it neutral.
“My reservation would be if IBM moves away from Hashicorp’s neutral stance in working with multiple cloud providers and focuses on IBM Cloud. I suspect that would not be the case as IBM has recently shown how they are more open with other cloud providers,” Crawford wrote in a recent blog post.
HashiCorp was founded in 2012 and raised almost $350 million before going public in 2021.
Founded in 2017, Atoms Lanka Solutions is a provider of IT consulting and software development services. Throughout the company’s history, we have worked with over 160 customers from 5+ countries..
