Augment

Siemens has decided to move a substantial portion of its software business to SaaS. According to Siemens, the new SaaS services will help users accelerate their digital transformation by delivering greater accessibility, easier collaboration, and limitless scalability.

Rapyd, a Fintech-as-a-Service (FaaS) company, has agreed to buy Valitor, a payments technology company, for $100 million from Arion Bank. SMB traders in Iceland, the United Kingdom and Ireland, and throughout Europe use the Icelandic Valitor. Rapyd plans to minimize FX fees, simplify omnichannel payment integration, and expand into new areas, allowing it to tap into revenue and growth possibilities that might otherwise be unavailable.

In a funding round, Your FLOCK, a remote work software company, received $ 0.3 million from GC Angels and a private angel. The cash will be utilized to enhance the company’s technological capabilities as well as its staff. Your FLOCK assists employees in becoming more engaged and businesses in being more productive and lucrative.

Santa Monica-based Frame, a startup providing an all-in-one portal for therapists and clients to create a multifaceted approach to mental wellness and therapy, has raised $3M in seed round funding from Maven Ventures, with participation from Sugar Capital, Struck Capital, Alpha Edison and January Ventures, reports state.

TeamApt has raised an undisclosed Series B funding from Novastar Ventures. Being a fintech company serving the financially underserved market in Nigeria, the company looks to expand its services beyond Nigeria, into Africa’s other markets.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has acquired Zerto in a $374 million all-cash deal, expected to close by the end of HPE’s fourth quarter. The move is aimed at expanding HPE GreenLake cloud services.

Hypersonix, an enterprise AI platform for commerce, has announced that it has raised $35 million at a valuation of $200 million in a Series B funding round led by B Capital Group. Other participants include Intel Capital, Firebolt Ventures, Magicus Ventures, and Gokul Rajaram, among others.   

Monisnap, a remittance fintech company, has raised $11.8 million in a fresh round of funding. The funds will be used to expand the company’s global client base, quadruple its technical staff, strengthen its B2B service, and improve its mobile money product. Currently, the Monisnap platform is used by over 200,000 people to send money to developing countries through over 100,000 local partners in over 100 countries.

Codat gets $40 million in a Series B financing round led by Tiger Global. Codat intends to utilize the cash to expand in the United States, provide more data products to its API, recruit faster, and onboard more clients. Codat’s goal is to assist small businesses by allowing suppliers to interact with all software packages that SMEs use using a single standardized API. 

Montreal-based Paper, a software provider of high-dosage tutoring, has announced its Series C fundraise of $100 million in a round led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP). The company said in a press release that it would use the proceeds from the fund to scale its business and increase investments in its Educational Support Systems (ESS). 

Online-learning SaaS provider Articulate Global has raised $1.5 billion in a Series A funding round at a valuation of $3.75 billion. Bootstrapped since its inception, this round marks Articulate’s first-ever fundraise, led by General Atlantic with participation from Blackstone Growth (BXG) and ICONIQ Growth.

Nowports has raised $16M in Series A funding from Mouro Capital and plans to streamline its process, solidify important routes and expand its logistics and financial operations, adding value as a digital freight forwarder for Latin American Companies.

Karat Financial, a black card and financial services platform specifically tailored for digital creators has announced $26 million in funding, including $15 million in a debt financing round and $11 million in Series A. The funding round was led by Union Square Ventures, with participation from GGV Capital and SignalFire.

zip24 has recently raised $1.2M in a pre-series round to fund its expansion in tech, product and operations teams. It aspires to strengthen operations by deploying direct sales and support personnel in Dubai, UAE expand to the UK in this year’s second half.

Barracuda Networks has signed a definitive agreement to acquire SKOUT Cybersecurity. With the close of the deal (in July), Barracuda would enter the extended detection and response (XDR) platform and offer proactive real-time continuous security monitoring and response services.

Desana, a hybrid workplace platform, raised $4M in a seed round headed by PropTech1 Ventures and Techstart Ventures. The firm plans to expand quickly with additional investment due to the high demand for its hybrid workplace solution. 

In a seed round led by AdvantEdge Founders, TyrePlex, an aftermarket tyre B2B eCommerce firm, earned an undisclosed sum. TyrePlex has over 1,700 dealers onboarded over 600+ locations and is quickly expanding at a rate of 30% month over month. 

A venture capital firm, Inflexor Ventures, has announced the closure of its second fund, which is valued at about USD 80.2 million. The tech fund will primarily invest in B2B/enterprise companies that use deeptech, technical IP, and innovation. The fund would invest in pre-Series A through Series B rounds, with initial investments ranging from $ 0.6 million to $ 2.6 million and follow-on rounds dependent on the performance of portfolio companies and their fundraising stage.

Detect Technologies, a company specializing in industrial AI, has raised $12 million in a round led by Accel Partners and Elevation Capital. According to the company’s statement, the money will be used to enhance worldwide industrial efficiency and extend the company’s position as a leader in industrial digitalization. The firm provides a wide range of AI and IoT solutions for the industrial sector.

BMW i Ventures announce their second sustainability-focused fund for early to mid-stage startups in the industries of transportation, manufacturing, supply chain and others. Previously, investments of the VC firm’s first fund, BMW i Ventures Fund 1, had helped companies in their journey to public.

ServiceTitan, a software company built to accelerate the home and commercial service industries, has entered a definitive agreement to acquire Aspire Software, a landscaping business management software provider. Alongside the acquisition, the company announced its $200 million Series G funding from Thoma Bravo at a valuation of $9.5 billion. This acquisition marks ServiceTitan’s second investment in the last twelve months (previously ServicePro) and its largest to date.

Slack launches Huddles, a feature to encourage casual conversations that get missed out due to remote working, and new video sharing and recording capabilities to help users share their thoughts ahead of a scheduled meeting, as per their convenience. These features would be rolled out for paid teams.

Device42 has developed a new solution that analyses your infrastructure and provides recommendations for cost-effective cloud migration. The program uses machine learning to assist in the discovery of the optimum configuration. Device42 is a software business founded in 2012 that specializes in hybrid IT discovery and application dependency mapping.

Ably, a synchronized digital experience platform provider has announced that it has raised $70 million in a Series B funding round led by Insight Partners and Dawn Capital LLP. Other participants include Digital Horizon, Forward Partners, and MMC Ventures, Triple Point. The new funds will help Ably continue developing and innovating its platform, giving businesses a comprehensive solution for offloading the rising complexity of real-time data synchronization at scale for distributed applications, devices, and hybrid cloud environments.

A pan-European venture capital firm, Nauta Capital, has announced ambitions to invest in pre-seed deeptech businesses across Europe. The specialized venture program will provide funding to pre-seed B2B deeptech businesses in order to help them develop and thrive. Nauta Funding’s new initiative, motivated by a shortage of capital available for pre-seed and pre-revenue B2B deeptech enterprises, will support 12-16 startups for the next 12 months to close the gap and propel Europe’s next generation of deeptech entrepreneurs.

Shogun has raised $67.5 million in a $575 million Series C funding round led by Insight Partners. The cash will improve the company’s two major products, Shogun Frontend and Page Builder. Frontend, Shogun’s newest offering, is a “headless” solution aimed at web designers and others who want to create more personalized experiences. It caters to the midmarket to the corporate consumers and has hundreds of clients.   

ARIADNEXT, French remote identity verification, and digital identity creation company, has been bought by IDnow, a German identity verification startup. As a result of the acquisition, IDNow is now on a level with OnFido, Europe’s other major participant. IDnow will keep ARIADNEXT’s offices in Rennes, Paris, Madrid, Bucharest, Iasi, Warsaw, and its approximately 125 employees. 

Mandolin, a concert live stream platform to help artists, venues, and fans connect through live music, has raised $12 million in its Series A fundraise in an oversubscribed round co-led by 645 Ventures and Foundry Group. Existing investors, High Alpha and TIME Ventures, participated in the round.

Pietra, a platform providing Creators business-building tools, has announced its Series A fundraise of $15 million in a round led by Founders Fund with participation from its existing investor, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), TQ Ventures, Abstract Ventures and other strategic investors.

Nodes & Links, a startup offering AI and cloud tools for engineering projects to be delivered on time and budget, has announced its Series A fundraise of €9.3 million ($11 million roughly). The round was led by urban sustainability-focused fund 2150, alongside Zigg Capital and Westerly Winds.

FloLive, an IoT company, has raised an additional $15.5 million in a Series B investment round led by Intel Capital. The additional money will be used to improve the company’s service and invest in and develop the company’s technology stack and upgrade its network to 5G. Rather than creating new infrastructure, FloLive’s approach is to stitch together networks from several places and run them as a single network.

Gusto, a unicorn company developing web-based payroll solutions for small and medium-sized businesses, has announced the launch of its new product, Gusto Embedded Payroll (GEP), which facilitates software developers to embed and customize payroll directly into their software. 

Noname Security, an enterprise API security business, raised $60M in a Series B funding round headed by Insight Partners. The company offers a security platform that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to assist businesses in monitoring and securing both managed and uncontrolled APIs. Since its launch, the firm has recruited 40 technical, reseller, and channel partners in six months.

Hyperexponential (hx), a mathematical software provider for the insurance sector, raised $18 million in a funding round headed by Highland Europe. According to the company, actuaries, data scientists, and underwriters may use Hx’s Renew SaaS platform to create, deploy, and update insurance pricing models more quickly.

Communications platform Zoom has announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire real-time machine translations (MT) solutions developer Karlsruhe Information Technology Solutions – Kites. The terms of the transactions remain undisclosed.

Cloud-based multi-channel commerce platform Shopify has brought down app store commission rates to zero for developers making their first $1M in revenue. Commission rates are cut for other developers (earning over $1M/year) as well, from 20 to 15 percent. This new revenue share model is extended to Theme Store developers as well.

Sequoia Capital India has welcomed 23 startups for the fifth cohort of Surge, its scale-up accelerator program for Indian and Southeast Asian startups. Surge 05, as the VC firm calls it, comprises 40 percent of SaaS and DevTools companies that have been building products for global markets ever since their inception.

Visier, a cloud-based analytics platform, has secured $125 million in a Series E investment round, valuing the company at $1 billion and has turned unicorn. Visier is a Canadian company that has created a big-data engine that can consume and analyze data from various HR and related apps. It offers a big-data engine it developed that can connect to any of those apps, absorb the data they contain, and match it up to provide current-state representations and increasingly predictive insights.

Peak, a venture capital firm located in Amsterdam, has joined the German market. It has announced the launch of its fourth €66 million fund (approx. USD 78.5M). Peak’s initial investments vary from €250K (about USD 0.2 million) to €4 million (approx. USD 4.7 million ). A large portion of the VC’s new fund has been set aside for follow-on rounds, which will assist portfolio entrepreneurs from pre-seed to Series B and beyond.

Nansen, a blockchain analytics platform, has raised $12M in Series A funding from a16z. The company was launched in 2020 and has shared details of its revenue figures, team size alongside the announcement. The proceeds from this funding would be used to build its data platform, enhance user experience, among others.

JFrog, a DevOps platform, paid $300 million for Vdoo. The purchase will be made using a mix of cash and stock. Vdoo will remain a distinct SaaS offering for the time being, according to JFrog. New updates will aid in support of the JFrog platform, and by 2022, the two businesses will have a completely integrated solution.

Forum Brands, a platform for growing and acquiring consumer brands, has announced its raise of $27 million equity funding in a round led by Norwest Venture Partners. Existing investors NFX and Concrete Rose participated in the financing round.

 ShipBob, a global logistics company, has raised $200 million in a Series E funding round, making it a unicorn. The company then provides its clients with a merchant application that allows them to keep track of inventory and connect with warehouses to choose which goods to pick and ship to fulfill orders. It works with several shipping companies to deliver products to customers. It claims to work with over 40 firms, including Amazon, Walmart, Shopify, BigCommerce, Wix, Square, and Squarespace.

The assets of edX have been acquired by 2U, Inc., a global leader in education technology. Through one of the most comprehensive free-to-degree online education systems, 2U and edX will reach over 50 million learners worldwide. Combining 2U’s industry-leading marketing capabilities and edX.org’s burgeoning marketplace, which saw over 120 million visitors in 2020, is expected to provide a scalable and sustainable marketing advantage. 

Virti, an interactive and immersive training platform, has raised $10 million in a Series A funding round led by IQ Capital with participation from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and Descenture Capital, reports indicate. Virti, founded in 2018, provides a platform to help companies train their employees via virtual training modules and simulations. With Virti, companies could build their own training modules and simulations without the need for coding and use AI, natural language processing to analyze a user’s performance and provide feedback. In 2020, it was included on TIME magazine’s annual best innovation list.

GitHub and Open AI have collaborated to launch GitHub Copilot, which leverages artificial intelligence to help one write code efficiently, reports state. The product is currently available for limited technical preview, available on its website.

San Francisco-based co-op, announced its close of seed funding round, where it raised $5.8 million led by Sugar Capital. Shopify, Bessemer Venture Partners, Indicator Ventures and RiverPark Ventures participated in the round.

Gympass, the $2.2 billion corporate health unicorn, has received $220 million in a Series E investment. Gympass exclusively works with companies who pay a one-time charge for a platform (app) that lets their employees pick from a choice of wellness programs.  

10club, an Indian startup similar to Thrasio, has raised $40 million in a seed funding round. The round was led by Fireside Ventures and an unnamed investor. In India, 10club is one of a few dozen companies aiming to duplicate what is known as the Thrasio-model. Several companies, like Thrasio, are attempting to buy brands that offer midrange to high-end items in markets with little competition.

In a seed round, Jetstream, an African supply chain network, received $3M. Jetstream was founded by Miishe Addy and Solomon Torgbor to monitor and regulate their own cross-border supply chains. Jetstream’s business model is straightforward. It charges for all of its services, including freight, clearing, and banking. Customs clearance is charged at a set rate that changes depending on the tax type and location of the shipment.

Acceleprise has officially rebranded itself as Forum Ventures, a name more fitting to its aspirations and activities, it states. Simultaneously, it has announced the launch of its $13.2M seed and $17.2M fourth fund for pre-seed B2B SaaS startups respectively.

Ramco Systems’ software would be used by Aden Ports Development Company. Its ERP software for APDC’s container terminal aims to reduce the manual tasks involved in its HR and finance operations via digitization. The software comes with a set of new, upgraded features and technologies.

Wonderflow, an AI-based customer feedback data startup, has announced that it has raised €16.5 million (approx. USD 19.6 million) in a Series B funding round led by Klass Capital. Other participants include P101, ITALIA 500, and Dutch top manager Jan Bennink. 

Los Angeles-based Arrows, a software provider helping companies onboard customers, has announced its raise of $2.75 million seed funding from Google’s AI-focused venture fund, Gradient Ventures, and 47 other angel investors. The company has listed the investors on its website.

Boundless, a remote employment platform, has raised €2.5 million (USD 2.9 million) in a seed funding round led by Ada Ventures and FYRFLY. This platform enables businesses to compliantly hire people globally while providing their employees with perks and opportunities in the nation where they work.

WiteSand, a startup that aims to take enterprise networking to cloud, has emerged from stealth mode, announcing its raise of $12.5 million in seed funding to date from institutions and angels. WiteSand, founded in 2019, consolidates on-premise networking tools into a unified cloud-delivered service and enables companies to monitor, secure and manage their enterprise network infrastructure. In a statement to the press, WiteSand enunciated the complications that medium to large enterprises face in networking due to employee mobility and hybrid work environments. Managing networking solutions on-premise is also tedious and time-consuming, it added.

San Francisco-based Side, a real estate technology company, helping independent brokerages turn into brands and business, has announced an additional $50 million fundraise to its $150 million Series D funding that it raised in March 2021. The additional funding values the company at $2.5 billion, which is more than a two-fold increase from its $1 billion valuation attained during Series D.

Elo7, a Brazilian online marketplace, will be acquired by Etsy, an American eCommerce company, for $217 million. Elo7, one of Latin America’s most popular e-commerce sites, would provide Etsy a far wider market presence, with 1.9 million active customers, 56,000 active merchants, and around 8 million items for sale. With its existing management team located in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Elo7 will continue to function independently.

Dell has released Omnia, an open-source software suite aimed at making AI and compute-intensive job deployment and administration easier. The program consists of an Ansible playbook for deploying convergent workloads with Slurm and containers and library frameworks, services, and apps. Omnia may utilize Slurm or Kubernetes to build workload management clusters, and it attempts to reuse existing projects rather than starting from scratch.

Camions Logistics Solutions Private Limited (“GoBOLT“), a tech-based logistics startup, has announced that it has raised $20 million in a Series B funding round led by Paragon Partners Growth Fund II and existing investor Aavishkaar Capital. Small supplementary components, as well as debt lines from private banks, are included in the round.

Mastercard has made a strategic equity investment in Instamojo, payments, and online commerce platform. Sampad Swain, Akash Gehani, and Aditya Sengupta established Instamojo as a small business payment processor in 2012. According to the two firms, the investment would benefit MSMEs as well as gig economy workers such as small food and beverage operators, electricians, tutors, and others.

Fleet management solutions provider LocoNav has announced its Series B fundraise of $37 million, led by Quiet Capital, Anthemis Group and Sequoia Capital India, reports state. The proceeds from the fund would be used for expanding into the US and other emerging markets, building partnerships, and making strategic acquisitions.

Tapcart, a SaaS platform enabling e-commerce merchants to launch and manage mobile apps for their brands, has announced its Series B fundraise of $50 million in a round led by Left Lane Capital. Shopify, SignalFire, Greycroft, Act One Ventures and Amplify LA, participated in the round. The company had raised $10 million in Series A funding led by SignalFire last year. With the current funding, the total amount raised by Tapcart crosses $65 million, as per Crunchbase.

LegalPay, a tech-based litigation platform, has raised an undisclosed sum of money with Ashwini Kakkar, the former CEO of Thomas Cook. With the extra capital, the company plans to expand its product and service offerings and has entered into a new kind of financing known as Interim Financing under the IBC, 2016.

Mercuryo, a global fintech company, has raised $7.5 million in a Series A round led by Target Global. The London-based company describes itself as a “crypto infrastructure company.” Its “digital asset payment gateway” aims to make blockchain useful for businesses. Mercuryo began onboarding clients in January 2019 and has had tremendous development since then, with ARR surpassing $50 million in April.

IBM, at the Mobile World Congress 2021, has announced a new hybrid cloud AI-powered automation tools for communications service providers (CSPs) to help them deliver on the promise of 5G, which includes zero-touch operations, lower costs and faster delivery of innovative services to clients. CSPs can leverage AI-powered automation to swiftly set up and manage networks in various contexts with IBM Cloud Pak for Network Automation, which is designed to scale new services in days rather than months.

The migration from the offline world to the virtual business model has been immense. Many companies were faced with problems to which there were no simple solutions. According to a recent study from Accenture, 81 percent of supply chain leaders believe the pandemic has been their organization’s toughest stress test, and they’re dealing with technology change at a record pace and scale. Many supply chain operations are still restricted by old legacy technology, requiring a patchwork of digital and non-digital systems to function. Businesses should increase cloud spending to support digital supply chains and foster ecosystem partnerships.

Windows 11 is Microsoft’s first significant operating system (OS) upgrade since 2015. By the end of the year, the update will be available. Microsoft’s latest approach contrasts sharply with Apple’s “walled garden” policy, in which the iPhone maker restricts customers to download apps via the App Store. In addition, Microsoft has announced that the Windows 11 operating system would include additional tipping options for content creators, including local news sites. 

Lenovo has launched an enhanced version of its SaaS-based health management tool, Lenovo Device Intelligence, in India on Thursday, reports state. The Lenovo Device Intelligence Plus, as it is called, is an enhanced extension of Lenovo’s AI-driven predictive analytics and also brings to the table, increased functionalities and proactive data insights.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced its acquisition of the top-secret message servicing app Wickr, used by government agencies, on Friday. The transactions of the deal remain undisclosed and AWS would be offering Wickr services with immediate effect for customers.

Edge Delta has announced the completion of a $15 million Series A financing round headed by Menlo Ventures. The Edge Delta team will use the new funds to expand their personnel and help new clients who have shown interest in the product. Edge Delta claims to deliver all of the features of the centralized approach by allowing organizations to examine logs, metrics, traces, and other data directly at the source.

Andreessen Horowitz has launched its Crypto Fund III, a dedicated $2.2B fund for blockchain startups in their early to late stages. The VC firm has been investing in crypto since 2013 from its dedicated crypto fund. The previous crypto fund, Crypto Fund II, had come out last year.

JW Player has raised $100M in a Series E funding round. Last month, this video software and data insights platform acquired live and on-demand video streaming provider Vualto. The proceeds from this fund would be used to accelerate its product innovation and to build its team.

Tonkean, a business operation automation startup, has announced its $50 million Series B funding, led by Accel. The company would use its proceeds to scale its hiring process across engineering and go-to-market teams and invest in its no-code orchestration platform for business operations.

Firebolt, an Israeli cloud data warehousing platform, raised $127 million in a Series B financing round. According to the company, its SQL-based solution is up to 182 times faster than existing data warehouses and is based on academic research that has yet to be applied. Its clients are already cloud-native, Big Data organizations, so it’s not trying to convert them; instead, it’s collaborating with those who are already there.

California-based env0, a self-service cloud management platform for collaborative remote-run workflow management, has announced its $17 million Series A fundraise, led by Microsoft’s Venture Fund – M12. Existing investors, Boldstart Ventures, Grove Ventures, and Crescendo Ventures, participated in the funding round. In a statement to the press, env0 stated that the funds would be used to expand its infrastructure as Code (IaC) platform, accelerate visibility, predictability and governance of cloud deployments. The funding comes amid growing demand for IaC.

San Francisco-based Sanity, a structured content platform provider, has announced a $39 million Series B funding, led by ICONIQ Growth. Lead Edge Capital and existing investors – Threshold Ventures, Heavybit Industries, Alliance Venture, and Monochrome Capital- participated in the round.

Illumio, a SaaS startup that provides automated cyberattack enforcement, has received $225 million in a Series F round headed by Thoma Bravo. The money will be used to grow the company’s field operations and network of channel partners and develop, engineer, and produce new products. Illumio’s solution is used by more than 10% of Fortune 100 companies, including Morgan Stanley, BNP Paribas SA, and Salesforce, to secure their data centers, networks, and other applications.

Legatics, a legal IT firm located in London, has received a USD 4.2 million growth capital investment from Mobeus. Legatics will welcome Joe Krancki, a Mobeus investor, to its board of directors. Mr. Seale launched Legatics in 2015 to revolutionize legal transactions by allowing deal teams to collaborate and close agreements in an interactive online environment. Since its inception, Legatics has been utilized by over 1,500 organizations, with more than half of the world’s leading banking and finance law firms purchasing the software.

Unicorn India Ventures led a $500,000 seed funding round for WINDO, a social commerce startup. WINDO is an Instagram commerce software company that assists small businesses and solopreneurs leverage consumer migration to Instagram. The Bengaluru-based company wants to be a one-stop-shop for businesses, letting them handle everything from the WINDO app, including centralization.

ApnaKlub, a social commerce platform, has announced that it has raised an undisclosed amount in a pre-Series A round led by Whiteboard Capital and Blume Ventures. The Bengaluru-based business, founded in 2020 by Harvard Business School alumni Shruti and Manish Kumar. ApanKlub claims to have served 2500+ partners over 4500 pin codes in just seven months. 

Classplus, a B2B educational technology firm, has secured $65 million in a Series C investment round headed by Tiger Global. Classplus, located in Noida, is a mobile-first SaaS platform that uses an app to make material distribution, payments, communication, and online assessments easier for private coaching schools and their teachers. With over 80% of users originating from Tier-II India, the firm claims that educators’ total profitability rises by 2x to 3x after six months of joining the network.  

Gotrade, a company that aims to remove cost barriers involved in investing in US stocks, has come out of its stealth mode, raising $7 million in a seed round fund led by LocalGlobe. Social Leverage, Y Combinator, Picus Capital and Raptor Group, participated in the round. Gotrade is now available to users from 150 countries. 

Channext, a software-as-a-service platform connecting vendors and business partners, has raised USD 0.8 million in a seed round. Channext will use the funds received in this round to extend its European footprint in countries such as Italy, the Nordics, and Spain. Despite the difficulties of starting a business during a pandemic, he continued, their company has expanded significantly in the last year.

Pathfndr.io, a no-code SaaS startup, has raised an undisclosed amount in pre-Series A round led by Arali Ventures. Other participants include SEA Fund, Wayfare Ventures, KPB Family Trust, Acsys Investments, and Capital A, JAZFund LLC, Shravan Gupta, and founders of unicorns Freshworks and Chargebee. Pathfinder.io is the operating name of Bengaluru-based MeTripping Technologies Pvt Ltd. The firm said in a statement that the additional money would be used to continue investing in product innovation at scale and expand its worldwide sales force.

Tomi.ai, an AI-powered platform optimizing digital ads, has announced its seed fundraise of $1 million from Begin Capital and Phystech Leadership Fund. Konstantin Bayandin, founder and CEO of Tomi.ai, on his LinkedIn handle, announced the funding and thanked the investors. According to reports, Mr. Bayndin would use the proceeds from the fund to expand the company’s platform

Hyderabad-based BigLeap has raised ₹5 crores ($0.67 million) in a debt fund from Anup Kumar Yama, a roller skater athlete from India and the CEO of Yama Skating Academy. Reports state that the funding was raised for the startup’s initiative, BigLeap.AI, a stealth-mode HR product aimed at simplifying the job search experience. According to the Times of India, The BigLeap.AI app is expected to be rolled out in September this year and would help job seekers to tap into active vacant jobs in different sectors.

New York-based Batch has raised $5 million in a seed round funding co-led by Coatue Seven Seven Six as per reports. The round witnessed participation from the Weekend Fund, Shrug Capital, and the Chainsmokers, among others. The startup provides QR codes to help retailers selling to customers, make re-ordering of their products fast and simple. Currently, the startup uses Apple’s App Clip technology assisting the users in loading a small part of the app on demand but plans to make it work on both iOS and Android eventually.

Acryl Data has come out of stealth mode, raising $9 million in a seed round led by 8VC, with LinkedIn and Insight Partners’ participation to help companies use their tools for their big data requirements. 

Golden Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm, has raised its fourth fund of $100M. The funds will be utilized to invest in new companies and follow-on investments in businesses outside of Golden Ventures’ portfolio. At this time, the fund’s primary goal is to profit from the growing trend of increased opportunity in the Canadian environment.

Mitiga, a cloud security startup, has raised $25 million in a Series A funding round led by DNX, ClearSky Security, and Atlantic Bridge.  According to the Israeli firm, the money will be used to “continue to disrupt how incident preparation and response is delivered,” as well as to “significantly” increase its cybersecurity, engineering, sales, and marketing employees.

Pequity, a compensation software builder for equitable pay, has raised $19 million in a Series A funding round led by Norwest Venture Partners. Other participants include Scribble Ventures, First Round Capital, and Designer Fund. The funds will be used to invest in products as well as hiring. The firm now has 20 employees on its payroll and plans to double that number by the end of the year, after favorable market feedback.

Frumtak Ventures has launched its third fund, Frumtak III, to invest in post-seed and Series A startups. The $57M fund would have a ticket size ranging from one to five million dollars for the companies it would invest in. The VC firm targets early-stage companies having a high growth potential.

Embark Trucks Inc. and Northern Genesis Acquisition Corp II have jointly announced that both the companies will be entering a definitive business combination agreement that will make Embark Trucks go public. This deal will give Embark Trucks a market value of $5.2 billion. Embark Trucks is an autonomous software technology developer for the trucking industry. 

Aircall, a cloud-based call center software firm with a $1.1 billion value, has raised $120 million in a Series D round, making it a unicorn. The business plans to hold an enormous technology stack and collaborate with large telecom companies to use their networks.

Vercel, a platform for creating, evaluating, and deploying Jamstack sites, has received $102 million in a Series C round with a valuation of $1.1 billion, making it a unicorn. Vercel is the open-source Next.js React framework’s creator. Traffic to all of the company’s websites and applications has tripled since October 2020, indicating significant growth. Carhartt, Github, IBM, McDonald’s, and Uber are among Vercel’s clients.

PlanetScale, the pioneer of Vitess, a database clustering system for MySQL, has announced its Series B fundraise of $30 million, led by Insight Partners. Andreessen Horowitz and SignalFire participated in the round.

Forto, a provider of digital logistics technology, digitized freight forwarding supply chain solutions, has turned a unicorn, raising $240 million in a Series C round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. The company’s valuation now stands at $1.2 billion.

In a move to unify developer experiences, providing intelligent applications, Amazon Web Services, and Salesforce have announced the expansion of their strategic partnership. The move would facilitate customers to use Salesforce and AWS capabilities in tandem to deploy robust and new business applications accelerating digital transformation quickly. 

Drata, a compliance and security automation company, has announced its Series A fundraise of $25 million in a round led by GGV Capital. Angel and other investors – SVCI (Silicon Valley CISO Investments), Okta Ventures, Basis Set Ventures- participated in the funding round.

Rocketlane, a B2B SaaS, received $3 million in initial investment from Matrix Partners India and Nexus Venture Partners. According to a senior corporate executive, the cash will be used to grow the company and hire more employees. Srikrishnan Ganesan, Vignesh Girishankar, and Deepak Bala established Rocketlane in 2020 as a purpose-built unified workplace for interacting with clients on onboarding efforts.