VC Deals Only: Contentsquare Raises $60M More To Improve Digital ...

VC Deals Only: Contentsquare Raises $60M More To Improve Digital ...: Contentsquare, a provider of cloud-based software which helps businesses analyze how users interact with apps and websites, has raised $60 ...

Contentsquare Raises $60M More To Improve Digital Retail Experiences

Contentsquare, a provider of cloud-based software which helps businesses analyze how users interact with apps and websites, has raised $60 million in a Series C round led by Eurazeo.

The round effectively doubles the amount of venture capital the seven-year-old Paris-based startup has raised, taking the total to $122 million. Previously, Contentsquare had secured a total of $62 million, with $42 million of that raised almost exactly one year ago today.

The latest round also included participation from a group of global investors, including SF-based Canaan Partners, Italy’s H14, and Highland Europe out of Switzerland. Eurazeo is in Paris.

Contentsquare’s service is a SaaS analytics tool that helps companies improve the user experience of their online businesses, making their products more user-friendly.

It’s a crowded space. Per G2Crowd, Contentsquare’s competitors include Smartlook, HotJar, Crazy Egg and FullStory. Other startups in the sector include Localytics and Optimizely, among many others, according to Owler.

Contentsquare is not the only company in its field attracting venture dollars. For example, of its American counterparts: Optimizely has raised a total of $146.2 million over time; Localytics has brought in $69.8 million and FullStory has picked up $27.2 million.

Contentsquare’s offering is apparently designed for various platforms, including desktop and mobile. The company also says its service integrates with other data systems like Google Analytics.

The latest capital infusion will go toward R&D, particularly AI and predictive analytics, and to help the company continue its global expansion, according to this WWD piece. Contentsquare customers include Walmart Inc., Tiffany & Co., LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, Samsung, and Ikea, WWD reports.

Source. Crunchbase News. Mary Ann Azevedo, January 28, 2019

VC Deals Only: This VR startup impressed Andreessen Horowitz so m...

VC Deals Only: This VR startup impressed Andreessen Horowitz so m...: In Sandbox VR founder Steve Zhao's thinking, his company goes against all the major trends in technology and investing. But Sandb...

This VR startup impressed Andreessen Horowitz so much that the VC firm flew back from Vegas to hammer out a $68 million deal at In-N-Out

In Sandbox VR founder Steve Zhao's thinking, his company goes against all the major trends in technology and investing.

But Sandbox VR is also a lot of fun when you experience it — which has helped the virtual-reality startup raise $68 million from top-tier investors, led by the Sand Hill Road stalwart Andreessen Horowitz.

The round was joined by Mike Maples from Floodgate, Stanford University, TriplePoint Capital, CRCM, and Alibaba. It's an interesting investment for those firms, as interest in early-stage virtual-reality investments has cooled lately. But Sandbox VR is a peculiar VR company — instead of making hardware and software you can use at home, it creates experiences in malls and other public locations that you have to travel to and that aren't available elsewhere.

Sandbox VR was started in Hong Kong, where it quickly found an audience.

"When we first opened in Hong Kong in 2017, when we opened the location, for the next 60 days we were sold out from morning until night," Zhao said.

At the time, Zhao was running the Sandbox VR system on the cheap — it uses a lot of pricey VR hardware, and Zhao had to create the software to stitch it together as well as the content that people experience. The company was close to running out of funds at one point. Now the company has 45 employees, seven locations in the US, Canada, and Asia, and a war chest to expand.

Sandbox VR provides a virtual-reality experience — you and your friends gear up, donning some of the latest VR headsets and high-tech computer backpacks, and are dropped into a virtual world, whether it's a pirate ship, a zombie invasion, or a vision of what Hong Kong could look like in 2088. It costs about $40 per person for an hourlong experience, which you book online.

Sandbox VR plans to use its Series A to expand to new locations and create different experiences — games — for people to play at Sandbox locations.

"We have locations planned for LA, Austin, New York, and Chicago, and we've inked multiple deals with Westfield malls across the country," Zhao said.

Though investing in new retail locations and content can be expensive, the Sandbox VR team believes it can keep the new locations booked up with enough new groups to make the investment worth it.

Kanye West and Marc Andreessen are fans

Sandbox VR expected a difficult fundraising process but was helped by a couple of factors, including that its experiences are basically designed to go viral on social media. 

"We are in three sectors that just aren't hot right now: There's VR, which is in nuclear winter, there's content, which is never hot, and there's retail, which basically nobody invests in — and we're a company that's in all three of them at the same time," Zhao said.

Part of how Sandbox VR markets itself is through social media. Participants get video of themselves all rigged up and can share clips of themselves as the characters inside the game.

"Seeing it on Instagram is going to be one of the really killer secrets of this business," said Andrew Chen, an Andreessen Horowitz partner. "When you are having such a good time, and it creates a video of you and all your friends screaming and ducking and like all this happening, and it's so fun, that's this leap that so many people share."

He added: "They've cracked the code on getting new customers in to try the experience, and I think that's really special."

Lots of Silicon Valley insiders have tried the game at Sandbox's location in San Mateo, California — but so have some celebrities, like the rapper Kanye West, who posted about it on Twitter.

"He was cool as a cucumber inside the experience, and we were worried: 'Is he having fun?'" Sandbox VR's chief product officer, Siqi Chen, told Business Insider. "But he came out of there super, super excited. He's tried a bunch of VR, just like me, and when he tried Sandbox it was just different.

"It was pretty surreal to walk through the mall, Kanye and Ben were there — it was insane that day," he continued, referring to Ben Horowitz, the Andreessen Horowitz general partner.

Another group of players who loved the experience were the partners of Andreessen Horowitz, which eventually led the startup's Series A. Sandbox VR's founders said Andreessen made an "offer you can't refuse," though the company isn't disclosing its valuation.

The overall vision for the company is to create a "Star Trek"-like holodeck, a concept that's alluring to technical and nerdy Valley venture capitalists.

"The next day after trying Sandbox, some Andreessen partners flew to Vegas to try out other VR experiences," Zhao said. "That same night, they flew back and called us up to meet at In-N-Out, and after three hours, at 1 a.m. in the morning, we hammered out a deal on a napkin."

Andreessen "told us he believed in the holodeck," Zhao said, "then he asked how much would it cost to have one in his house."

That might not be possible, but soon there's likely to be a location in a mall near him. 

Source: Business Insider, January 2019

***

This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the venture capital, private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to Canadian VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.

Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.

Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax.

VC Deals Only: U.S. bank trade group, Accenture and others back f...

VC Deals Only: U.S. bank trade group, Accenture and others back f...: NEW YORK (Reuters) - Accenture Plc, SunTrust Banks Inc and the American Bankers Association, a trade group for U.S. banks, said on Friday...

U.S. bank trade group, Accenture and others back fintech startup Finxact

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Accenture Plc, SunTrust Banks Inc and the American Bankers Association, a trade group for U.S. banks, said on Friday that they had joined a $30 million investment round in Finxact, a startup that develops the back-end technology used by banks to process some transactions.

Existing investors, including Live Oak Ventures, First Data Corp, Woodforest National Bank and T.N. Incorporation Ltd of Thailand also participated in the round, the companies said in an interview.

Finxact plans to use the funding to develop its technology and grow its operations, Frank Sanchez, the company’s chief executive and founder, said in an interview.

The investment comes as banks of all sizes grapple with old technology infrastructure as they seek to offer more digital services to their customers. Many of these systems were built decades ago and are ill-equipped to handle services customers have come to expect in the internet age such instant peer-to-peer payments or real-time account balance updates.

Smaller banks often cite this issue as one of the biggest hurdles they face in competing with younger financial services providers or larger banks that can fund costly back-end replacements.

 “I have heard from bankers across the country who wish they had more nimble and agile core processing platforms that allowed them to keep pace with customer demands,” ABA President and CEO Rob Nichols said via email. “We understand that a bank’s ability to innovate is highly dependent on its core processing platform.”

This is the second significant technology investment since Nichols’ took over as the ABA’s chief executive in 2015.

Florida-based Finxact says its more modern cloud-based platform is built to enable banks to offer better digital services to their customers and is less expensive to run than older systems.
“It is substantially more efficient to operate,” Sanchez said.

The company targets regional and community banks but also works with neo banks, or large banks who plan to migrate their old systems, Sanchez said.

Source. Reuters. Reporter Anna Irrera,  January 25, 2019

VC Deals Only: Keyfactor Raises $77 Million from Insight Venture ...

VC Deals Only: Keyfactor Raises $77 Million from Insight Venture ...: Investment to Fund Continued Revenue Growth, Innovation & Customer Success   CLEVELAND, Ohio – January 22, 2019 – Keyfactor , a l...

Keyfactor Raises $77 Million from Insight Venture Partners

Investment to Fund Continued Revenue Growth, Innovation & Customer Success

 

CLEVELAND, Ohio – January 22, 2019 – Keyfactor, a leading provider of secure digital identity management solutions, today announced that it has closed a $77 million growth funding round with Insight Venture Partners, a leading global venture capital and private equity firm focused on high growth technology and software companies.

Keyfactor will use the investment to continue its accelerating market expansion and meet the growing demand for its comprehensive suite of solutions, including Keyfactor Command (a complete and scalable certificate management platform) and Keyfactor Control (providing end-to-end identity security in the IoT lifecycle). The company has doubled revenue year-over-year and now secures more than 500 million certificates for Global 2000 clients worldwide.

“We’re thrilled to join the Insight Venture Partners portfolio and look forward to exponential growth and innovation,” said Kevin von Keyserling, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder at Keyfactor. “InfoSec professionals are challenged to fully anticipate and understand their cyber risk to continuously improve and scale their cyber defenses – and Keyfactor is committed to giving our customers the freedom to fully protect the next generation of applications and devices. This investment enables us to strengthen our leadership position as innovation partner to InfoSec professionals.”

Founded in 2001 as Certified Security Solutions (CSS), Keyfactor recently rebranded in November 2018 to reflect the Company’s goal of empowering global enterprises with the freedom to master every digital identity. The Keyfactor platform automates real-time discovery, monitoring, issuing and replacement of digital certificates and keys while blocking untrusted access.

“Keyfactor is a best-in-class technology solving a mission-critical problem for enterprise security and the Company’s commitment to customers is unparalleled,” said Michael Triplett, Managing Director at Insight Venture Partners. “Keyfactor’s suite of solutions enables businesses to get ahead of today’s threats while giving them the ability to scale and innovate for the future. We evaluated this segment thoroughly and chose to invest in the company that possessed clear technological leadership and is driving the greatest customer success.”

“We serve the industries where trust and reputation matter most – including healthcare and financial services – and where innovative solutions provide competitive advantage,” said John Harris, Chief Revenue Officer at Keyfactor. “Our significant growth and trust of our clients demonstrates we are on the right path, and having the backing of a pre-eminent investor like Insight Venture Partners gives Keyfactor additional muscle to continue our sector-leading innovation to the full benefit of our customers.”

Source. Keyfactor. Press Release, January 22, 2019