Funding Announcement Archives • Page 3 of 9 • SAP.iO

SAP.iO In Singapore, Funding Announcement, HR & People Engagement

wagely nets additional $8.3m in oversubscribed pre-series A funding

wagely, Asia’s fastest-growing financial wellness platform has raised $8.3 million in an oversubscribed pre-series A funding as the company scales its platform to help workers access their earned salaries on demand in Indonesia and Bangladesh. The funding comes in just seven months after securing its seed funding.

The oversubscribed round was led by East Ventures (Growth Fund) with participation from existing backers, including Integra Partners, the Asian Development Bank, Global Founders Capital, Trihill Capital, Blauwpark Partners, and 1982 Ventures which brings the total funding raised to $14 million in less than two years.

wagely also disclosed that it secured the backing of Central Capital Ventura, the VC arm of Indonesia’s largest private bank, Bank Central Asia (“BCA”). The investment into wagely underpins the commitment to expand the digital financial ecosystem and drive financial wellness solutions across Indonesia.

With stagnant incomes, rising costs of living, and lack of savings, workers are under daily pressure staying afloat financially. The options for this segment are very limited when faced with an urgent need for cash. The result is a vicious cycle of repeated reliance on payday loans and other costly financial products leading to omnipresent financial stress among the workforce. Launched in 2020, wagely is building a holistic financial wellness platform with earned wage access (“EWA”) at its core that lets workers of partner employers access their earned wages in real-time. The concept, which has been proven in several markets across the globe, has been adopted by some of the most renowned organizations, including Walmart, Pizza Hut, and Visa, to reduce turnover, enhance productivity, and increase business savings.

Innovative supply chain solution secures £5m in funding to expand in Europe

Flowlity, an innovative AI-based supply chain planning and forecasting solution, has secured £5 million in funding, led by Fortino Capital, to expand throughout Europe. The funding will be used to accelerate its development with the aim to becoming an industry leader by providing innovate ways of reducing waste across the entire supply chain – enabling companies to save money and reduce their carbon footprint.

Immerse Raises $9M in Series B Funding

Immerse, an Irvine, CA-based provider of a virtual reality language teaching and learning platform, raised $9M in Series B funding.

The round, which brings total capital raised to $11.5m, was led by Eagle Venture Fund and Mustang Creek Capital.

The company intends to use the funds to grow its team, to invest in continued product innovation and to launch its VR app onto other major VR platforms. Immerse plans to grow its global team from 12 to 35 over the next four months and is already hiring for a variety of education, engineering and marketing roles.

Led by CEO Quinn Taber, Immerse is a virtual reality language teaching and learning platform in the metaverse used in partnership with the world’s top language schools to deliver VR English language learning experiences to students in the Asian, European and Latin American markets.

GraphQL developer platform Hasura raises $100M Series C

Hasura, the company behind the popular open source Hasura GraphQL Engine that can turn virtually any database into a GraphQL API, today announced that it has raised a $100 million Series C funding round led by Greenoaks. Previous investors Nexus Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Vertex Ventures also participated in this round, which brings the company’s total funding to $136.5 million and its valuation to $1 billion.

As Hasura CEO and co-founder Tanmai Gopal told me, the company has seen its growth accelerate over the course of the last 18 months since it raised its $25 million Series B round. As developers are increasingly tasked to build applications on top of an ever wider range of data sources, they are looking for a service like Hasura.

“The enterprise developer is just absolutely bogged down with complexity,” he said. “They’re just completely deadlocked. They’re like, ‘man, I have like a thousand models in this legacy data system. I have a bunch of new stuff that is ML/AI enriched in this new system. I have these legacy APIs. And all I really want to do is modernize my application screen so that somebody can see their billing history.’ […] What Hasura does, is say: We make this data access self-serve. We’ll automate this. We’ll give you an API that is flexible, it’s secure and it’s an API that you love — it’s a GraphQL API — and we’ll automate that.”

SegmentStream nabs $2.7M to enable marketing analytics without cookies

SegmentStream, a U.K.-based marketing analytics company is working to help enterprises thrive in a post-cookie era.

Third-party cookies have long enabled enterprises to track the online activity of their users to deliver personalized ads and then measure the success of those campaigns. The practice has been very effective, but internet giants have also been on a quest to end the software’s use over privacy concerns. Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox already block cookies, while Google plans to discontinue them by 2023, which could upend the whole way of digital advertising.

“All existing marketing analytics and multitouch attribution tools – including Google Analytics, RockerBox, AttributionApp, Bizible, Datorama – analyze marketing performance using deterministic ways of stitching retrospective conversions with traffic sources, which doesn’t work in a new ‘post-cookie’ world due to intelligent tracking prevention, cross-browser/cross-device customer journeys, and other cookie-tracking limitations,” Constantine Yurevich, cofounder and CEO of SegmentStream, told Venturebeat.

As a result, he said, most website sessions (and therefore advertising clicks) do not receive any attributed value, which creates issues for marketers when evaluating the impact of their marketing channels and campaigns. Plus, the lack of information about the assigned value of each advertising click prevents smart bidding algorithms of popular ad platforms (such as Facebook Ads) from properly functioning.

Pecan AI raises $66 million in Series C funding round

Israeli analytics and data science startup “Pecan AI” announced Wednesday that they have raised $66 million in their latest Series C funding round. The funds will be used for research and development.

Pecan AI has raised over $100 million in VC funding in the last twelve months alone. Its Series C round was led by New York-based global private equity and venture capital firm Insight Partners, with participation from GV (formerly Google Ventures) and existing investors S-Capital, GGV Capital, Dell Technologies Capital, Mindset Ventures and Vintage Investment Partners.

“We believe that any company should be able to deploy AI-based predictive analytics, even without data science resources on staff,” said CEO and co-founder Zohar Bronfman. “This new funding will help us scale Pecan further to overcome the data science scarcity gap, enabling our customers to move beyond outdated data-mining techniques that offer little value in predicting future outcomes.”

Inspectorio Raises $50 Million To Help Brands Ensure Quality In Their Supply Chain

Supply chain is a web that spans so wide that many large corporations can’t easily track the entire life cycle for each of its products — let alone capture enough data to ensure that everything is being done to standards and protocol. Carlos Moncayo knows the system all too well as the former founder and CEO of ASIAM Inspector, a company that supports brands and retailers with sourcing operations in Asia, he did everything from inspections to auditing to sourcing. This gave Moncayo deep insight on the many layers of the supply chain and it wasn’t pretty. He noticed a lot of issues surrounding visibility. After 10 years with the company, he was surprised they hadn’t gotten any better.

“We thought with supply chain management and production chain management, the only way to solve [the issues] was to approach it from moving offline relations to online relations and helping companies make sense of the data coming out of that,” he tells Forbes. But at the time, no one was trying to tackle that, so the former founders of ASIAM decided to try it themselves. They launched Inspectorio in 2016 to help companies and brands move their supply chain online and have better visibility and data surrounding quality and sustainability. Since Inspectorio launched its first product in 2017, the company has expanded its product offerings and more than 7,000 customers including Target and Kohl’s have signed on.

The Minneapolis-based startup raises a $50 million Series B round led by Insight Partners with participation from Techstar Ventures, Matchstick Ventures and strategic backers including Flexport, among others, as originally reported in Midas Touch newsletter. Ryan Hinkle, a managing director at Insight, says the firm has been building a relationship with Inspectorio since the beginning of the startup’s life. While the investment could have been sparked by the company’s progress — Hinkle points to the startup’s 93% revenue growth in 2021 — for him it was a bit more personal. His family used to own a clothing store and he remembers helping unwrap shirts and using a measuring tape to ensure the sleeves were the same length and that the size labels matched when he was a kid. Both of which would fall under the quality control assurances Inspectorio looks to provide further down the supply chain.

Smart IoT tracking startup Tag-n-Trac launches with $10M in new funding

“Internet of things” tracking startup Tag-n-Trac Inc. today launched out of stealth with $10 million in new funding.

Dell Technologies led the Series A round, with Merck Global Innovation Fund and Aerosafe Global also participating. Including the new funding, Tag-n-Trac has raised $11.8 million to date, according to data from Crunchbase.

Founded in 2020, Tag-n-Trac was founded with the goal of modernizing the entire logistics lifecycle. The company offers a full-stack IoT solution that integrates multiple modes of hardware, software and data technology to build smarter solutions that solve complex problems. The founding team consists of senior executives with engineering leadership experience in WiFi, Bluetooth, sensors and positioning technologies.

Tag-n-Trac says its platform offers complete, real-time visibility into the entire global supply chain ecosystem. The company’s technology combines low-cost “printable” hardware sensors and a sensor-agnostic software-asa-serivce platform to help shippers, logistics providers and manufacturers track goods’ location, status and condition from manufacturing to shipping to delivery.

The Tag-n-Trac platform, powered by wireless Bluetooth and cellular smart label technologies, grants a complete end-to-end view to help efficiently address production obstacles such as temperature excursions, tamper detection and potential diversions. Usable in various verticals, Tag-n-Trac works with supply chain partners, including multi-modal third-party logistics, enterprise resource planning, business intelligence software providers, and packaging and labeling manufacturers.

Jebbit Raises $70 Million Strategic Growth Investment From Vista Equity Partners

Jebbit, provider of the world’s leading zero-party data platform, has received a $70 million strategic growth investment from Vista Equity Partners, the leading global investment firm focused exclusively on enterprise software, data and technology-enabled businesses. The growth capital will help the company scale across all departments to further accelerate its mission to help brands deliver personalized digital experiences that collect data that is willingly and intentionally shared by a consumer (“zero-party data”).

Jebbit’s no-code platform enables companies to build beautiful interactive product and personality quizzes, lookbooks, trivia, lead generation forms and more that gather zero-party and first-party data. Jebbit experiences help brands drive higher engagement, lead capture and conversion while maintaining data privacy and security. In a world where cookies and ID’s will no longer be a reality, Jebbit’s solutions empower companies of all sizes to gain deep customer insights that fuel engagement and increase sales. Jebbit’s easy-to-launch, no code quizzes offer seamless integration and scalability, making them ideal for small- and medium-sized business as well as large global enterprises, across a wide range of industries, including consumer packaged goods, retail and commerce, travel and hospitality, and financial services.

Collaboration platform CloudApp raises $9.3M to enhance workplace productivity

Visual work communication tool CloudApp has raised $9.3 million in Series A funding led by Grayhawk Capital and Nordic Eye. The round also includes previous investors Kickstart Fund, Cervin Ventures, New Ground Ventures, Bloomberg Beta and new entrants Peninsula Ventures & Forward VC. It also features CloudApp customers Peter Kazanjy, the CRO of Atrium, and Derek Andersen, the CEO of Startup Grind and Bevy.

Founded in 2015, CloudApp aims to help teams share information faster through instantly shareable videos, gifs and screenshots. The tool is an all-in-one screen recording software that captures and embeds HD video, marked-up images and more into workflows. Every file users create is securely stored in the cloud, and accessible via CloudApp’s native Mac and Windows Apps, or shareable on the web through secure password-protected links.

The goal of the company is to help teams avoid having to schedule extra calls or emails and instead communicate their message through simple shareable videos. CloudApp sees itself as a visual voicemail that can be read at any time without disrupting workflows. The tool supports dozens of integrations, including Slack, Atlassian, Trello, Zendesk and Asana. Since its launch, CloudApp has garnered more than four million total users. Notable CloudApp clients include Adobe, Uber, Zendesk and Salesforce.

BigID Announces Splunk Ventures Investment to Extend Data Management Innovation

BigID, the leading data intelligence platform that enables organizations to know their enterprise data and take action for privacy, security, and governance, today announced Splunk Ventures is investing in BigID’s next phase of growth and innovative technology development.

Splunk Ventures is the corporate venture capital arm of Splunk Inc., the data platform leader for security and observability, and is dedicated to investing in organizations that expand and enhance the value of business data to drive outcomes. BigID is an innovator in data intelligence, with an ML-powered enterprise platform that reimagines data management for data discovery, privacy, security, and governance. BigID helps customers proactively manage and protect their data, reduce risk, and get more value from their data.

Data drives the world, and as digital transformation and cloud initiatives continue to accelerate, BigID’s modern approach to data management is purpose built to address the challenges of today’s data landscape. With BigID, customers can make better decisions with their data, achieve compliance, scale with evolving data privacy and protection landscape, and ultimately reimagine how they manage their data.

“Now more than ever, organizations need clearcut ways to harness their data to drive innovation while also remaining compliant and secure,” said Varoon Bhagat, vice president of Corporate Development for Splunk. “Our investment in BigID is the latest example of our commitment to transform data into business value and remove the barrier between data and action.”

Wandelbots raises another $84 million to teach robots without code

Dresden, Germany-based Wandelbots has raised a healthy sum in the years since it appeared on our Disrupt Berlin stage, way back in 2017. The following year, the no-code robotic software firm raised $6.8 million, followed by another $30 million in June 2020, as excitement around automation continued to build as COVID slowed manufacturing to a crawl.

Today the firm returns with a healthy $84 million Series C, putting its funding well north of $100 million to date. This latest round was led by Insight Partners and featured a slate of existing investors, including 83North, Microsoft, Next47, Paua, Atlantic Labs and EQT.

Wandelbots’ mission is a deceptively simple one, and something a number of firms are pushing to solve in the space. Can a robotic software layer lower the barrier of entry for deploying robotics in a factory setting? Specifically, how can a firm deploy a robotic army without the need for a lot of outside help, significant sums of money and/or robotic coding know-how? The company’s solution involves a “Trace Pen,” which an instructor uses to mimic a motion and train the robot in the process. The motion can then be fine-tuned on the software without coding.

Verusen Raises $25M in Series B Funding

Verusen, an Atlanta, GA-based provider of tools to manage materials for global supply chains, raised $25m in Series B funding.

The round was led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from current investors Glasswing Ventures, Flyover Capital, Zetta Venture Partners, Forte Ventures, BMW i Ventures, and Kubera VC.

The company intends to use the funds to accelerate its global footprint, and further build out its AI-driven technology platform expanding its reach in both the Indirect MRO (Maintenance, Repair and Operations) and Direct Materials space.

Mention Me secures £18.5 million Series B investment led by Octopus Ventures

Mention Me, the customer advocacy platform, has secured a $25m Series B round, led by Octopus Ventures. Lead investor from the prior round Eight Roads Ventures also participated.

The London-based scale-up helps businesses turn referrals into a strategic channel for acquiring high-quality customers, while gathering valuable first-party data that amplifies wider marketing activity.

Mention Me will use the funds to support its vision to make every brand think advocacy-first by expanding into the US, investing in its partner network (which includes Klaviyo, TrustPilot, Ometria and SAP) and developing its product offering. This includes further development of Mention Me’s approach to applying AI and machine-learning to referral data, so brands can more effectively identify their biggest fans and optimise the wider customer experience to drive customer advocacy.

The platform’s unique Referral Engineering® technology has already delivered more than 4.5 million referrals totalling more than USD $1.5 billion in revenue for clients globally. Sports brand Puma, international franchise Pret a Manger, InsurTech unicorn Bought By Many, Europe’s leading online florist Bloom & Wild and international fashion retailer ASOS are among its 450-strong client base.

The funding will also be used to grow the team following a series of senior hires. This includes Roy Robinson from Boxever as CPO to lead product development, Ash Rama, previously at Trustpilot, as VP People and Rebecca Hooley joining from private equity firm Livingbridge as CFO.

Office leasing proptech Estie completes $9m Series A

Estie, a Japanese proptech operating an office leasing and rental office matching service, announced raising a approximate ¥1 billion ($8,750,000 USD) Series A, according to TechCrunch Japan. The company says it will use the funds to strengthen its HR team recruitment and plans to expand both its product and operation departments in order to build, develop and support its multi-product commercial real estate offering.