Canada Week. Coconut Software Raises $1.75M in Debt Financing

Coconut Software, a Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada-based cloud SaaS appointment scheduling and lobby management solution provider, raised $1.75m in debt financing.

CIBC Innovation Banking provided the financial resources.

The company will use the financing to support its strategic plan and to invest in its growth.

Founded in 2007 and led by Katherine Regnier, CEO, Coconut Software provides a centralized, service engagement platform, which allows financial organizations to optimize their workforce with real-time insights into sales and support interactions, while providing a customer experience across all touchpoints, whether online, in-branch, or through the contact center.

The company, which also has an office in Toronto, is backed by Information Venture Partners, ScaleUp Ventures, StandUp Ventures and Neal Dempsey of Bay Partners.

Source. FinSMEs, Staff, April 24 2019

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A Cloud Guru raises $33 million for cloud platform classes and labs

By Kyle Wiggers

Austin, Texas-based A Cloud Guru, a self-styled social learning platform for cloud computing technologies, today announced that it has raised $33 million in growth equity financing led by Summit Partners, with contributions from AirTree Ventures and Elephant. The fresh capital brings the startup’s total raised to roughly $40 million, according to CrunchBase. CEO and cofounder Sam Kroonenburg says it’ll be used to accelerate hiring, expand A Cloud Guru’s content library with specialized programs, and build features targeting enterprise customers.

“We are humbled by this level of support from our investment partners,” added Kroonenburg. “We are eager to continue building our engineering, content, and go-to-market teams to support our customers and partners. We are now even better positioned to help more businesses and individuals learn to cloud.”

A Cloud Guru was founded in 2015 by Sam Kroonenburg and former Microsoft lead engineer Ryan Kroonenburg (his brother) after Ryan struggled to find affordable, effective learning resources for cloud app development. He recorded A Cloud Guru’s first class in a makeshift studio from his London apartment over the course of six weeks and submitted it to a popular training site, where it went on to attract over 8,000 paying customers.

“It’s amazing to think how far we’ve come since those early days in 2015,” said Ryan Kroonenburg. “With this round of investment, we have additional resources to do even more in support of the A Cloud Guru community.”

A Cloud Guru offers certification courses covering a range of IT domains and cloud platforms, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. It recently launched ACG for Business, a premium learning management and talent development service that counts Dow Jones, Capital One’s DevExchange, Expedia, Women Who Code, and Qualcomm among its clients. And A Cloud Guru claims that to date, more than 850,000 students across 186 countries have taken its classes, labs, and quizzes.

Enterprise workloads continue to move to the cloud at an enormous pace, requiring a new set of IT skills to design, manage and secure applications,” said Summit Partner managing director Tom Jennings, who joined A Cloud Guru’s board of directors as part of the funding round. “ACG’s platform uniquely enables organizations to develop their existing employees’ cloud skills and provide ongoing training to ensure continued aptitude in cloud architecture. And the results are impressive.”

In addition to its Austin, Texas headquarters, A Cloud Guru has offices in Washington, D.C., Melbourne, and London.

News of the company’s funding comes days after another online education platform, Coursera, raked in $103 million at a valuation of $1 billion. Stanford professor and former Google executive Sebastian Thrun’s Udacity, meanwhile, has gone on to raise $160 million in less than eight years, while data science course provider DataCamp has raised over $30 million.

Online education platforms are anticipated to grow from a $4 billion industry today to a hefty $21 billion market by 2023, according to research firm Markets and Markets. Last year alone, about 20 million users signed up for at least one online course, and the number of paying customers increased substantially.

Source. Venture Beat, Kyle Wiggers, April 29, 2019

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This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the Canadian 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 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.

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Redis Labs: $60M Series E To Scale Out Its In-Memory Data Store

By Jason D. Rowley

Today, Redis Labs announces that it raised $60 million in a Series E round. Francisco Partners (“FP”), a global late-stage technology investment firm, led the round, taking a position in Redis Labs for the first time. Prior investors—including Goldman Sachs Private Capital Investing, Bain Capital Ventures, Viola Ventures, and Dell Technologies Capital—participated in the funding round.

As part of the transaction, Francisco Partners’ chief investment officer David Golob will take a seat on the company’s board of directors and FP operating partner Eran Gorev will join as a board observer, according to a statement from the company.

Including this round, Redis Labs has raised $146.6 million in venture funding. The company did not disclose its new valuation. Redis Labs says it will use its new funding to accelerate business expansion globally and to “invest further in the enthusiastic Redis community.”

What Is Redis?

Redis Labs is the company behind Redis Enterprise and Redis, an open-source in-memory data structure store, which can be implemented as a database, cache, or message brokerage. According to industry tracking site DB-Engines, Redis is the seventh-most-popular database system overall, and the most popular key-value store in production use today. Redis has been deployed in nearly 1.38 billion Docker containers at the time of writing, according to its website.

Redis stores data in memory, which has the benefit of being terrifically fast but somewhat expensive to run at scale. Almost all computing hardware components (from CPUs to hard drives to solid-state storage) have gotten cheaper over the years, but RAM prices can be volatile and remain high relative to other parts.

In conjunction with a trend of bigger companies turning to managed services instead of in-house development using open source software infrastructure, the high memory requirements of Redis drove its adoption through cloud computing platforms, which offer their own versions of Redis’s key-value store as another commoditized computing service.

To an extent, this has been good for the broad adoption of open source Redis, but perhaps less good for Redis Labs itself. Financially, much of the benefit redounded to the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and other cloud computing platforms offering Redis as a software service running on platform-managed hardware. Accordingly, Redis Labs has attempted to capture more value from its software, all while trying to reconcile business needs with its roots in community-driven software.

According to a licencing page on the Redis Labs website, the core Redis database software is available via open source license (BSD). Redis Enterprise, an optimized, more full-featured database engine, is closed-source and available via commercial license through Redis Labs. There is a space in between the two offerings though, which is filled with software modules that enhance or extend the functionality of open-source Redis. Some of these modules are produced by the Redis development community, while others are produced by Redis Labs itself.

In a move that ruffled feathers of some in the open source software community back in August 2018, Redis Labs announced it would move some of the modules it developed in-house off the open source AGPL license to an Apache v2.0 license modified with a Commons Clause, which technically isn’t open source, but rather “source available.”

Proponents of the Commons Clause says it prevents massive cloud computing platforms from simply re-selling the Commons Clause-protected software as a service. Critics say it’s a way for private, for-profit companies to financially benefit from community-developed software. Licencing battles are nothing new in open source software development and the Commons Clause is one of its new fronts.

In the funding announcement Redis Labs shared with Crunchbase News, the company says its commercial products feature “a variety of data modeling techniques, such as Streams, Graph, Document and Machine Learning, with a real-time search engine.” The modules which facilitate some of those value-added services—RediSearch, RedisGraph, ReJSON, Redis-ML, and ReBloom—were the ones Redis Labs released under the new license.

Source. Techcrunch, Jason D. Rowley February 19, 2019