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Oracle, a leading integrated cloud applications and platform services provider, is looking to strengthen their presence in China and to do that, have decided to collaborate with iClick Interactive Asia Group limited. iClick is a Chinese independent online marketing and enterprise data solutions provider and a member of Oracle Partner Network. This collaboration will help Oracle to launch tailored SaaS offering that will empower brands to better serve and connect with consumers. 

Mainspring Services, a Title and escrow software company announced the release of their SaaS Platform, “titleLOOK”. This Platform streamlines your title production process. The first SaaS product by the company, titleLOOK addresses a major pain point for lenders, underwriters and consumers. The software will help users automatically publish preliminary documentation and reports which can then be shared with customers and stakeholders instantly. 

The Governance, Risk and Compliance giant, Diligent Corporation, that is used by nearly 19,000 clients, has announced that it will be acquiring Galvanize, a global leader in SaaS GRC software. Diligent Corporation has signed a contract towards this, however, the financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. This transaction follows Diligent’s planned acquisition of Steele Compliance Solutions Inc. a leader in ethics and compliance SaaS, which was signed earlier this year in February. Both these transactions are expected to come to a conclusion in March. With this acquisition, Diligent will become the largest SaaS GRC provider globally. 

ThinkIQ, a pioneer of digital manufacturing transformation SaaS, today announced an expansion in their suite. The new SaaS solutions by the manufacturing platform, features four new areas of data functionality, included with ThinkIQ's Visualize, Insight, Transform and Enterprise solutions. This will help manufacturers make sense of data surfacing actions that enhance safety, reliability and efficiency. The new platform components integrate with existing IoT infrastructure to help manage everything from supply chains to manufacturing processes and beyond. 

Networking giant Cisco is looking to invest $3 million to $5 million in Indian enterprise SaaS start-ups for a minority stake. The company has a portfolio of about 10 start-ups that it has already invested in directly or through investment partnerships with VC funds.Whatfix, Videonetics, Mobikwik, Mobstac and CloudCherry are some of the start-ups in its portfolio in India.

Tackle.io, a software company dedicated to helping software providers generate revenue through the Cloud Marketplaces, today announced it has raised $35 million in Series B funding, in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz and joined by existing investor Bessemer Venture Partners. This round of funding will be used to further Tackle’s platform innovation and mission to transform the experience of selling and buying enterprise software.

Vindicia, part of the Amdocs Media Division and a provider in business-to-consumer digital services monetisation, has extended its long-standing engagement with Vimeo.Vindicia provides Vimeo with a complete subscription management and retention solution to maximise customer lifetime value and business agility.

Sydney-based SaaS provider Alcami Interactive has been acquired by US-based Criteria, a SaaS people analytics platform vendor.
Alcami was founded by chief executive Jane Bianchini in 2014 and provides an on-demand video interviewing platform.

Security firm McAfee announced this morning that it will be selling its enterprise business to a consortium led by the private equity firm Symphony Technology Group for $4 billion.McAfee President and Chief Executive Officer Peter Leav says that his company has decided to direct the firm’s resources to the consumer side of the business. “This transaction will allow McAfee to singularly focus on our consumer business and to accelerate our strategy to be a leader in personal security for consumers,” he said in a statement.

The New York based company, Olo,  that provides a SaaS platform to restaurants for online ordering and delivery, has announced the terms for its IPO. Olo is looking to raise $306 million by offering 18 million shares at a price range of $16 to $18. Olo would have a fully diluted market value of $3.1 billion at the midpoint of the proposed range. By the end of last year, Chilli’s, Wingstop, Shake shack were all using Olo’s platform for their business’. Olo helps restaurants with an enterprise grade saas platform to manage their digital business’K2fly, a new type of global software company that delivers enterprise-wide technical assurance solutions for environment, social and governance (ESG) performance has announced that it has closed a 5-year resource inventory management software SaaS contract with Coeur Mining Inc. which will be rolled out to all five of its locations. Coeur is a precious metals mining company listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). 

Survey Sparrow, An Omni-channel Experience Management Platform, decided to go the extra mile as part of their women’s day recruitment initiative. They announced a joining bonus of 50,000 rupees (Just over 700 dollars) to women who have applied for jobs in product development, quality assurance and technical writing roles on or before March 15 and ready to join the company by April 15th. They are looking to fill up to 50 vacancies. CEO of Survey Sparrow said that as a company, they have tried to bridge the gender gap in the organisation and hope this initiative will help them reach a 50:50 ratio from the current 70:30 favouring men at the moment.

SaaS And Enterprise Software Veteran Lisa Schreiber joins BlackLine as chief customer officer. With over 20 years experience in SaaS and Enterprise Software, the company is looking towards Lisa to oversee it’s Implementation, Strategic Innovation, Customer Success, Support and Training teams as the accounting automation software leader continues to transform the way Finance and Accounting departments work.

Vendr has announced a $60 million Series A funding round. This funding round was led by Tiger Global, along with existing investors, Y Combinator, Sound Ventures, Craft Ventures, F-Prime Capital and Garage Capital. This comes after Vendr has successfully raised a Seed round of just over 6 Million Dollars by the middle of 2020. 

Over 6500 servers of the enterprise software VMware are currently exposed due to a security vulnerability. This vulnerability exposes servers and allows malware to be slipped into unpatched devices to take over companies’ entire networks. The situation has been classified as “Highly Critical” and was reported to VMware, who have released official patches and are urging all customers to update their systems as soon as possible.

Salesforce has been getting into a string of amazing investments over the last financial year.They have declared a whopping 2.17-Billion-dollar gain on Investments made. This is primarily due to investments in companies like snowflake and nCino. Snowflake had an amazing Q4 where their revenue rose by 117% raking in 190 Million dollars.

Tel Aviv based payroll and management cloud platform company, Papaya Global, raised its Series C funding round of over $100 Million last week. This brings their valuation to over $1Billion dollars. In total, Papaya has now raised $190 million from Series B and C since October last year. Papaya will use the new funding to meet the strong demand for its global workforce management platform, reinforce its market leadership, as well as invest in its product, engineering and go-to-market teams.

Austin Texas based company, Jungle Scout, raised $110m in growth funding led by Summit Partners and Jungle Scout Founder & CEO Greg Mercer. The company intends to use the funds to expand its technology suite by acquiring Seattle-based Downstream Impact, an Amazon advertising technology company founded by former Amazon employees Connor and Salim in 2017. This acquisition is aimed at extending Jungle Scout’s SaaS platform to support Walmart, and continue to scale its capabilities in advertising and full-scale ecommerce brand management.

Having moved over the last 5 years from a hardware company to a hardware-enabled SaaS platform, Airtame has a change in leadership. With Co-founder and CEO Jonas Gyalokay  moving on to become the chairman of the board, Current CFO, Martin Wagner will fill his boots and take over as CEO of the company. Martin said, and I quote “With a strategic mindset and sharp operational management, we’re now preparing to fulfill our growth potential in a post-COVID world, where schools will return and businesses will reopen. I look forward to leading the team as we prepare for an exciting year ahead”. 

The Irish-American financial services and SaaS company, known to help startups and enterprises alike to accept payments and manage their online business has struck a deal with Atlassian. Atlassian, known for its project management tool Jira and collaboration tools Trello and Confluence, help large numbers of companies to stay organised and focused. In a strategic effort to serve customers better, their CIO Archana Rao said in an announcement that, and I Quote, “We’re leaving all things payments to Stripe so our teams remain focused on strengthening our unique sales motion to bring products to markets for our customers,” 

By exploiting a set of flaws in Microsoft’s Exchange software to break into email accounts and read messages without authorization, A network of Chinese hackers are suspected of hacking thousands of emails. Small businesses, government offices and schools in the U.S. as well as state and local governments were affected as a result of the targeted hack. The flaws further allowed the hackers to install unauthorized software on systems.

In Mergers and Acquisitions, Canadian company, Wecommerce is acquiring Stamped, a Singapore-based startup known for software that lets online sellers implement loyalty programs and manage customer reviews, for 110 million Dollars. WeCommerce is a listed Canadian company worth over $700 million that owns several Shopify-related services and softwares. 

Co-founder of Optimizely Dan Siroker has a new startup and it transcribes what you say in your Zoom meeting. The startup is called Scribe, and though it is currently only available with Zoom, Dan and the team are looking to get it working with Google Meet and Microsoft teams and other meeting apps. Their goal, to get a “hive mind” set up for organisations, where ideas and thoughts that are voiced can be searched.

Ireland-based online learning company Olive Group has acquired Thiruvananthapuram-based edtech SaaS platform Ofabee for an undisclosed amount in yet another international acquisition of an Indian enterprise tech startup. We also cover Highland cloud, SPAC, and Quest's funding.