Europe
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Product School raises $25M in growth equity to scale its product training platform
Traditional MBA programs can be costly, lengthy and often lack the application of real-world skills. Meanwhile, big global brands and companies who need product managers to grow their businesses can’t sit around waiting for people to graduate. And the edtech space hasn’t traditionally catered to this sector.
This is perhaps why Product School says it has secured $25 million in growth equity investment from growth fund Leeds Illuminate (subject to regulatory approval) to accelerate its product and partnerships with client companies.
The growth funding for the company comes after bootstrapping since 2014, in large part because product managers (PMs) are no longer needed just inside tech companies but have become sought after across almost virtually all industries.
Product School provides certificates for individuals as well as team training, and says it has experienced an upwelling of business since COVID switched so many companies into digital ones. It also now counts Google, Facebook, Netflix, Airbnb, PayPal, Uber and Amazon amongst its customers.
“Product managers have an outsized role in driving digital transformation and innovation across all sectors,” said Susan Cates, managing partner of Leeds Illuminate. “Having built the largest community of PMs in the world validates Product School’s certification as the industry standard for the market and positions the company at the forefront of upskilling top-notch talent for global organizations.”
Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia, CEO and founder of Product School, who started the company after moving from Spain, said: “There has never been a better time in history to build digital products and Product School is excited to unlock value for product teams across the globe to help define the future. Our company was founded on the basis that traditional degrees and MBA programs simply don’t equip PMs with the real-world skills they require on the job.”
Product School has also produced the The Product Book, The Proddy Awards and ProductCon.
Its main competitor is MindTheProduct, a community and training platform, which has also boostrapped.
Powered by WPeMatico
Turkey’s first decacorn: Trendyol raises $1.5B at a $16.5B valuation
Trendyol, an e-commerce platform based in Turkey, has raised $1.5 billion in a massive funding round that values the company at $16.5 billion. General Atlantic, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Princeville Capital and sovereign wealth funds, ADQ (UAE) and Qatar Investment Authority co-led the round.
The deal marks SoftBank’s first in the country.
The new financing also makes Trendyol Turkey’s first decacorn, and among the highest-valued private tech companies in Europe. It comes just months after strategic — and majority — backer Alibaba invested $350 million in the company at a $9.4 billion valuation.
Founded in 2010, Trendyol ranks as Turkey’s largest e-commerce company, serving more than 30 million shoppers and delivering more than 1 million packages per day. It claims to have evolved from marketplace to “superapp” by combining its marketplace platform (which is powered by Trendyol Express, its own last-mile delivery solution) with instant grocery and food delivery through its own courier network (Trendyol Go), its digital wallet (Trendyol Pay), consumer-to-consumer channel (Dolap) and other services.
Image Credits: Founder Demet Mutlu / Trendyol
Trendyol founder Demet Suzan Mutlu said the new capital will go toward expansion within Turkey and globally. Specifically, the company plans to continue investing in nationwide infrastructure, technology and logistics and toward accelerating digitalization of Turkish SMEs. She said the company was founded to create positive impact and that it intends to continue on that mission.
Evren Ucok, Trendyol’s chairman, added that part of the company’s goal is to create new export channels for Turkish merchants and manufacturers.
Melis Kahya Akar, managing director and head of consumer for EMEA at General Atlantic, said that Trendyol’s marketplace model — ranging from grocery delivery to mobile wallets — “brings convenience and ease to consumers” in Turkey and internationally.
“Turkey is one of the fastest growing economies in the world and benefits from attractive demographics, with a young population that is very active online,” wrote General Atlantic’s Kahya Akar via e-mail. “We expect its already sizable e-commerce market –$17 billion in 2020 – to continue to grow meaningfully on the back of growing online penetration. We think Trendyol is ideally positioned to meet the needs of consumers in Turkey and around the world as the company expands.”
A 2020 report by JPMorgan found that e-commerce represented only 5.3% of the overall Turkish retail market at the time but that Turkish e-commerce had notched impressive leaps in revenues in recent years: 2018 alone saw the market jump by 42%, followed by 31% in 2019. As of 2020, 67% of the Turkish population were making purchases online.
Powered by WPeMatico
Privacy-oriented search app Xayn raises $12M from Japanese backers to go into devices
Back in December 2020 we covered the launch of a new kind of smartphone app-based search engine, Xayn.
“A search engine?!” I hear you say? Well, yes, because despite the convenience of modern search engines’ ability to tailor their search results to the individual, this user-tracking comes at the expense of privacy. This mass surveillance might be what improves Google’s search engine and Facebook’s ad targeting, to name just two examples, but it’s not very good for our privacy.
Internet users are admittedly able to switch to the U.S.-based DuckDuckGo, or perhaps France’s Qwant, but what they gain in privacy, they often lose in user experience and the relevance of search results, through this lack of tailoring.
What Berlin-based Xayn has come up with is personalized, but a privacy-safe web search on smartphones, which replaces the cloud-based AI employed by Google et al. with the innate AI in-built into modern smartphones. The result is that no data about you is uploaded to Xayn’s servers.
And this approach is not just for “privacy freaks”. Businesses that need search but don’t need Google’s dominant market position are increasingly attracted by this model.
And the evidence comes today with the news that Xayn has now raised almost $12 million in Series A funding led by the Japanese investors Global Brain and KDDI (a Japanese telecommunications operator), with participation from previous backers, including the Earlybird VC in Berlin. Xayn’s total financing now comes to more than $23 million.
It would appear that Xayn’s fusion of a search engine, a discovery feed and a mobile browser has appealed to these Asian market players, particularly because Xayn can be built into OEM devices.
The result of the investment is that Xayn will now also focus on the Asian market, starting with Japan, as well as Europe.
Leif-Nissen Lundbæk, co-founder and CEO of Xayn said: “We proved with Xayn that you can have it all: great results through personalization, privacy by design through advanced technology and a convenient user experience through clean design.”
He added: “In an industry in which selling data and delivering ads en masse are the norm, we choose to lead with privacy instead and put user satisfaction front and center.”
The funding comes as legislation such as the EU’s GDPR or California’s CCPA have both raised public awareness about personal data online.
Since its launch, Xayn says its app has been downloaded around 215,000 times worldwide, and a web version of its app is expected soon.
Over a call, Lundbæk expanded on the KDDI aspect of the fund-raising: “The partnership with KDDI means we will give users access to Xayn for free, while the corporate — such as KDDI — is the actual customer but gives our search engine away for free.”
The core features of Xayn include personalized search results; a personalized feed of the entire internet, which learns from their Tinder-like swipes, without collecting or sharing personal data; and an ad-free experience.
Naoki Kamimeada, partner at Global Brain Corporation said: “The market for private online search is growing, but Xayn is head and shoulders above everyone else because of the way they’re re-thinking how finding information online should be.”
Kazuhiko Chuman, head of KDDI Open Innovation Fund, said: “This European discovery engine uniquely combines efficient AI with a privacy-protecting focus and a smooth user experience. At KDDI, we’re constantly on the lookout for companies that can shape the future with their expertise and technology. That’s why it was a perfect match for us.”
In addition to the three co-founders (Leif-Nissen Lundbæk, chief executive officer, Professor Michael Huth, chief research officer, and Felix Hahmann, chief operations officer), Dr Daniel von Heyl will come on board as chief financial officer. Frank Pepermans will take on the role of chief technology officer and Michael Briggs will join as chief growth officer.
Powered by WPeMatico
Do bronze medals ever make sense for unicorns?
Last week, Deliveroo made news when it announced it was preparing to leave the Spanish market. The recently listed Deliveroo couched its explanation in market terms, noting its market position in Spanish on-demand delivery wasn’t sufficient to warrant continued investment. Left unmentioned: A Spanish legal change requiring companies that previously depended on freelance couriers to hire their delivery staff.
Race Capital’s Edith Yeung helped explain the Deliveroo choice to The Exchange, saying the Spanish market doesn’t have a very large population, which may mean that the “potential upside for being #1 in Spain has [a] ceiling.”
While she noted that she doesn’t have access to Deliveroo data, her statement jibes with the company’s own comment that Spain made up less than 2% of its aggregate gross transaction value (GTV) in the first half of 2021.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.
Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.
One company exiting a market is not a big deal, but we were curious about Deliveroo’s comments regarding the need for market leadership — or something close to it — to warrant continued investment. Is this the common reality for startups battling for market position, no matter if those markets are cities or countries?
Some startup markets have trended toward monopolies or duopolies. The Uber-Didi battle in China led to the companies agreeing to stop competing. Uber also recently sold its Uber Eats business in India to Zomato. In the United States, Uber and Lyft’s smaller competitors have long been forgotten and both the American ride-hailing giants continue to battle for dominance.
There are other familiar examples of this trend of consolidation. The food delivery game is concentrated amongst leading players. Postmates failed to survive as an independent company, winding up as part of Uber’s operations. Perhaps Gopuff will manage to claw out a spot in the market, but DoorDash and Uber Eats together accounted for 83% of the U.S. food delivery business in June this year, per Second Measure data.
It’s no surprise that some startup markets lean toward monopolies or duopolies. Many countries protect intellectual property via patents that can constrain new innovation to one or two players for an extended period of time. Monopolies can also arise when a new technology or method of business is invented — Google’s internet parsing search tech led to a nigh-monopoly in many markets, for example.
In businesses where efficiencies of scale have a large effect, monopolies can form when leading players consolidate smaller competitors until just one or two companies remain. Standard Oil is the canonical example of this process.
What’s interesting about the on-demand delivery market is that it is both incredibly expensive but isn’t very technologically difficult to get into, which has meant that many companies have jumped into the sector around the world. This means on-demand delivery is the opposite of other patent-protected markets from which we might expect monopolies to form or competition to be extinguished past the top two players.
Yet, it’s also an industry where economies of scale can play a key role in profit generation, and increased competition can lead to price wars and advertising tussles. It’s a ripe market, then, for consolidation, even if it lacks an exploitable IP base.
Powered by WPeMatico
European refurbished electronics marketplace Refurbed raises $54M Series B
Refurbed, a European marketplace for refurbished electronics which raised a $17 million Series A round of funding last year, has now raised a $54 million Series B funding led by Evli Growth Partners and Almaz Capital.
They are joined by existing investors such as Speedinvest, Bonsai Partners and All Iron Ventures, as well as a group of new backers — Hermes GPE, C4 Ventures, SevenVentures, Alpha Associates, Monkfish Equity (Trivago Founders), Kreos, Expon Capital, Isomer Capital and Creas Impact Fund.
Refurbed is an online marketplace for refurbished electronics that are tested and renewed. These then tend to be 40% cheaper than new, and come with a 12-month warranty. The company claims that in 2020, it grew by 3x and reached more than €100 million in GMV.
Operating in Germany, Austria, Ireland, France, Italy and Poland, the startup plans to expand to three other countries by the end of 2021.
Riku Asikainen at Evli Growth Partners said: “We see the huge potential behind the way Refurbed contributes to a sustainable, circular economy.”
Peter Windischhofer, co-founder of refurbed, told me: “We are cheaper and have a wider product range, with an emphasis on quality. We focus on selling products that look new, so we end up with happy customers who then recommend us to others. It makes people proud to buy refurbished products.”
The startup has 130 refurbishers selling through its marketplace.
Other players in this space include Back Market (raised €48 million), Swappa (U.S.) and Amazon Renew. Refurbed also competes with Rebuy in Germany and Swapbee in Finland.
Powered by WPeMatico
Edtech startup bina raises $1.4M to teach 4- to 12-year-olds, launch School-as-a-Service
With the pandemic wreaking havoc amongst early years education amid school lockdowns, it’s no wonder edtech startups have piled into the space. But it has also served to highlight the abysmal nature of early years teaching: Some 40 million teachers across the globe are leaving the sector, according to the World Bank. Of the 1.5 billion primary-age children, only a few can access high-quality education, and approximately 58 million primary-age children are out of education, most of whom are girls.
So the opportunity to make a difference, using online teaching, in these very young years, is great, because classes sizes can be reduced online, and the quality of teaching improved.
This is the idea behind bina, which bills itself as a “digital primary education ecosystem”. It has now raised $1.4 million to aim at the education of 4- to 12-year-olds.
The funding round was led by Taizo Son, one of Japan’s billionaires. Other investors and advisors include Jutta Steiner, founder at Parity Technologies, the company behind Polkadot decentralized protocol, and Lord Jim Knight, ex-Minister of Education (U.K.).
Bina’s “schtick” is that it has very small online class sizes of six students (3x smaller than the OECD average).
It also boasts of “adaptive learning paths” that cover international standards; teachers with a minimum of eight years of digital teaching experience; and data-driven decision making for its pedagogical approach.
Noam Gerstein, bina’s CEO and founder said: “I’ve interviewed students, teachers and parents globally for years, and it is clear a new systemic design is needed. With our founding families, we are building a world in which every child has access to quality education, educators’ skills are valued and continuously developed, and parents don’t need to choose between their work and family life.”
He says it also grants pupils company shares (RSUs) as they grow with the school. Currently available to English-speaking students in the CET time zone, the bina School is planning a SaaS product for governments, NGOs and school systems.
“We right now compete against companies like Outschool, Pearson’s online Academy, Primer and Prisma,” he told me over a call. “So these are the big names of the last year for the first phase. But the strategy is that we’re building it in two phases. The first phase is actually building a school that we operate as a ‘lab’ school. And the second phase is what we call ‘bina as a service’. So it’s a SaaS ‘school as a service’. The idea is that we offer collaboration with NGOs and governments, doing accreditation and training and licencing of the product. So for that second part we’re actually competing against the big accreditation system.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Planted raises another $21M to expand its growing plant-based meat empire (and add schnitzel)
Swiss alternative protein company Planted has raised its second round of the year, a CHF 19 million (about $21 million at present) “pre-B” fundraise that will help it continue its growth and debut new products. A U.S. launch is in the cards eventually, but for now Planted’s exclusively European customers will be able to give its new veggie schnitzel a shot.
Planted appeared in 2019 as a spinoff from Swiss research university ETH Zurich, where the founders developed the original technique of extruding plant proteins and water into fibrous structures similar to real meat’s. Since then the company has diversified its protein sources, adding oat and sunflower to the mix, and developed pulled pork and kebab alternative products as well.
Over time the process has improved as well. “We added fermentation/biotech technologies to enhance taste and texture,” wrote CEO and co-founder Christoph Jenny in an email to TechCrunch. “Meaning 1) we can create structures without form limitation and 2) can add a broader taste profile.”
The latest advance is schnitzel, which is of course a breaded and fried piece of pounded-thin meat style popular around the world, but especially in the company’s core markets of Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Jenny noted that Planted’s schnitzel is produced as one piece, not pressed together from smaller bits. “The taste and texture benefit from fermentation approach, that makes the flavor profile mouth watering and the texture super juicy,” he said, though of course we will have to test it to be sure. Expect schnitzel to debut in Q3.
It’s the first of several planned “whole” or “prime” cuts, larger pieces that can be prepared like any other piece of meat — the team says their products require no special preparation or additives and can be dropped in as 1:1 replacements in most recipes. Right now the big cuts are leaving the lab and entering consumer testing for taste tuning and eventually scaling.
The funding round came from “Vorwerk Ventures, Gullspång Re:food, Movendo Capital, Good Seed Ventures, Joyance, ACE & Company (SFG strategy) and Be8 Ventures,” and was described as a follow-on to March’s CHF 17M series A. No doubt the exploding demand for alternative proteins and growing competition in the space has spurred Planted’s investors to opt for more aggressive growth and development strategies.
The company plans to enter several new markets over Q3 and Q4, but the U.S. is still a question mark due to COVID-19 restrictions on travel. Jenny said they are preparing so that they can make that move whenever it becomes possible, but for now Planted is focused on the European market.
(Update: This article originally misstated the new round as also being CHF 17M — entirely my mistake. This has been corrected.)
Powered by WPeMatico
White-label SaaS shipping startup Outvio closes $3M round led by Change Ventures
Outvio, an Estonian startup that provides a white-label SaaS fulfillment solution for medium-sized and large online retailers in Spain and Estonia, has closed a $3 million early-stage financing round led by Change Ventures.
Also participating were TMT Investments (London), Fresco Capital (San Francisco) and Lemonade Stand (Tallinn). Several angels also joined the round, including James Berdigans (Printify) and Kristjan Vilosius (Katana MRP). This is the startup’s first institutional round of funding after bootstrapping since 2018.
Online retailers usually have to use a number of different tools or hire expensive developers to create in-house shipping solutions. Outvio offers online stores of any size a post-purchase shipping setup, which seeks to replicate an Amazon-style experience where customers can also return packages. Among others, it competes with ShippyPro, which runs out of Italy and has raised $5 million to date.
“We can give any online store all the tools needed to offer a superior post-sale customer experience,” Juan Borras, co-founder and CEO of Outvio, said. “We can integrate at different points in their fulfillment process, and for large merchants, save them hundreds of thousands in development costs alone.”
“What happens after the purchase is more important than most shops realize,” he added. “More than 88% of consumers say it is very important for them that retailers proactively communicate every fulfillment and delivery stage. Not doing so, especially if there are problems, often results in losing that client. Our mission is to help online stores streamline everything that happens after the sale, fueling repeat business and brand-loyal customers with the help of a fantastic post-purchase experience.”
“While online retailing has a long way to go, the expectations of consumers are increasing when it comes to delivery time and standards,” Rait Ojasaar, investment partner at lead investor Change Ventures, said. “The same can be said about the online shop operators who increasingly look for more advanced solutions with consumer-like user experience. The Outvio team has understood exactly what the gap in the market is and has done a tremendous job of finding product-market fit with their modern fulfillment SaaS platform.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Coralogix logs $55M for its new take on production analytics, now valued at $300M-$400M
Data may be the new oil, but it’s only valuable if you make good use of it. Today, a startup that has built a new kind of production analytics platform for developers, security engineers, and data scientists to track and better understand how data is moving around their networks is announcing a round of funding that underscores the demand for their technology.
Coralogix, which provides stateful streaming services to engineering teams, has picked up $55 million in a Series C round of funding.
The round was led by Greenfield Partners, with Red Dot Capital Partners, StageOne Ventures, Eyal Ofer’s O.G. Tech, Janvest Capital Partners, Maor Investments and 2B Angels also participating.
This Series C is coming about 10 months after the company’s Series B of $25 million, and from what we understand, Coralogix’s valuation is now in the range of $300 million to $400 million, a big jump for the startup, coming on the back of it growing 250% since this time last year, racking up some 2,000 paying customers, with some small teams paying as little as $100/year and large enterprises paying $1.5 million/year.
Previously, Coralogix — founded in Tel Aviv and with an HQ also in San Francisco — had also raised a round of $10 million.
Coralogix got its start as a platform aimed at quality assurance support for R&D and engineering teams. The focus here is on log analytics and metrics for platform engineers, and this still forms a big part of its business today. Added to that, in recent years, Coralogix’s tools are being applied to cloud security services, contributing to a company’s threat intelligence by providing a way to observe data for any inconsistencies that typically might point to a breach or another incident. (It integrates with Alien Vault and others for this purpose.)
The third area that is just picking up now and will be developed further — one of the uses of this investment, in fact — will be to develop how Coralogix is used for business intelligence. This is a particularly interesting area because it plays into how Coralogix is built, to provide analytics on data before it is indexed.
“It’s about high-volume, but low-value data,” Ariel Assaraf, Coralogix’s CEO, said in an interview. “Customers don’t want to store the data [or index it] but want to view it live and visualize it. We are starting to see a use case where business information and our analytics come together for sentiment analysis and other areas.”
There are dozens of strong companies providing tools these days to cover log analytics and data observability, underscoring the general growth and importance of DevOps these days. They include companies like DataDog, Sumo Logic and Splunk.
However, Assaraf believes that what sets his company apart is its approach: Essentially, it has devised a way of observing and analyzing data streams before they get indexed, giving engineers more flexibility to query the data in different ways and glean more insights, faster. The other issue with indexing, he said, is that it impacts latency, which also has a big impact on overall costs for an organization.
For many of Coralogix’s competitors, turning around the nature of the business to focus not first on indexing would be akin to completely rebuilding the business, hard to do at their scale (although this is what Coralogix did when it pivoted as a small company several years ago, which is when Assaraf took on the role of CEO). One company he believes might be more of a direct rival is Confluent.
“I think we will see Confluent getting into observability very soon because they have the streaming capabilities,” he said, “but not the tools we have.” Another potential competitor looming on the horizon: Salesforce, and its potential move into that area, underscores the shifting sands of what is powering enterprise IT investment decisions today.
Salesforce already has Heroku, Slack and Tableau, three major tools developers use for tracking and working with data, Assaraf pointed out, and there were strong rumors of it trying to buy DataDog, “so we definitely see where they are going. For sure, they understand the way things are changing. All the budgets when Salesforce first started were in marketing and sales. Now you sell to IT. Salesforce understands that shift to developers, and so that is where they are going.”
It makes for a very interesting landscape and future for companies like Coralogix, one that investors believe the startup will continue to shape as it has up to now.
“The dramatic shift in digital transformation is generating an explosion of data, which until now has forced enterprises to decide between cost and coverage,” said Shay Grinfeld, managing partner at Greenfield Partners. “Coralogix’s real-time streaming analytics pipeline employs proprietary algorithms to break this tradeoff and generate significant cost savings. Coralogix has built a customer roster that comprises some of the largest and most innovative companies in the world. We’re thrilled to partner with Ariel and the Coralogix team on their journey to reinvent the future of data observability.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Atera raises $77M at a $500M valuation to help SMBs manage their remote networks like enterprises do
When it comes to software to help IT manage workers’ devices wherever they happen to be, enterprises have long been spoiled for choice — a situation that has come in especially handy in the last 18 months, when many offices globally have gone remote and people have logged into their systems from home. But the same can’t really be said for small and medium enterprises: As with so many other aspects of tech, they’ve long been overlooked when it comes to building modern IT management solutions tailored to their size and needs.
But there are signs of that changing. Today, a startup called Atera that has been building remote, and low-cost, predictive IT management solutions specifically for organizations with less than 1,000 employees, is announcing a funding round of $77 million — a sign of the demand in the market, and Atera’s own success in addressing it. The investment values Atera at $500 million, the company confirmed.
The Tel Aviv-based startup has amassed some 7,000 customers to date, managing millions of endpoints — computers and other devices connected to them — across some 90 countries, providing real-time diagnostics across the data points generated by those devices to predict problems with hardware, software and network, or with security issues.
Atera’s aim is to use the funding both to continue building out that customer footprint, and to expand its product — specifically adding more functionality to the AI that it currently uses (and for which Atera has been granted patents) to run predictive analytics, one of the technologies that today are part and parcel of solutions targeting larger enterprises but typically are absent from much of the software out there aimed at SMBs.
“We are in essence democratizing capabilities that exist for enterprises but not for the other half of the economy, SMBs,” said Gil Pekelman, Atera’s CEO, in an interview.
The funding is being led by General Atlantic, and it is notable for being only the second time that Atera has ever raised money — the first was earlier this year, a $25 million round from K1 Investment Management, which is also in this latest round. Before this year, Atera, which was founded in 2016, turned profitable in 2017 and then intentionally went out of profit in 2019 as it used cash from its balance sheet to grow. Through all of that, it was bootstrapped. (And it still has cash from that initial round earlier this year.)
As Pekelman — who co-founded the company with Oshri Moyal (CTO) — describes it, Atera’s approach to remote monitoring and management, as the space is typically called, starts first with software clients installed at the endpoints that connect into a network, which give IT managers the ability to monitor a network, regardless of the actual physical range, as if it’s located in a single office. Around that architecture, Atera essentially monitors and collects “data points” covering activity from those devices — currently taking in some 40,000 data points per second.
To be clear, these data points are not related to what a person is working on, or any content at all, but how the devices behave, and the diagnostics that Atera amasses and focuses on cover three main areas: hardware performance, networking and software performance and security. Through this, Atera’s system can predict when something might be about to go wrong with a machine, or why a network connection might not be working as it should, or if there is some suspicious behavior that might need a security-oriented response. It supplements its work in the third area with integrations with third-party security software — Bitdefender and Acronis among them — and by issuing updated security patches for devices on the network.
The whole system is built to be run in a self-service way. You buy Atera’s products online, and there are no salespeople involved — in fact most of its marketing today is done through Facebook and Google, Pekelman said, which is one area where it will continue to invest. This is one reason why it’s not really targeting larger enterprises (the others are the level of customization that would be needed; as well as more sophisticated service level agreements). But it is also the reason why Atera is so cheap: it costs $89 per month per IT technician, regardless of the number of endpoints that are being managed.
“Our constituencies are up to 1,000 employees, which is a world that was in essence quite neglected up to now,” Pekelman said. “The market we are targeting and that we care about are these smaller guys and they just don’t have tools like these today.” Since its model is $89 dollars per month per technician using the software, it means that a company with 500 people with four technicians is paying $356 per month to manage their networks, peanuts in the greater scheme of IT services, and one reason why Atera has caught on as more and more employees have gone remote and are looking like they will stay that way.
The fact that this model is thriving is also one of the reason and investors are interested.
“Atera has developed a compelling all-in-one platform that provides immense value for its customer base, and we are thrilled to be supporting the company in this important moment of its growth trajectory,” said Alex Crisses, MD, global head of New Investment Sourcing and co-head of Emerging Growth at General Atlantic, in a statement. “We are excited to work with a category-defining Israeli company, extending General Atlantic’s presence in the country’s cutting-edge technology sector and marking our fifth investment in the region. We look forward to partnering with Gil, Oshri and the Atera team to help the company realize its vision.”
Powered by WPeMatico