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Square acquires corporate catering startup Zesty
Square has acquired elements of corporate catering startup Zesty . Square, which already owns on-demand food delivery service Caviar, plans to use Zesty’s assets to strengthen Caviar’s corporate ordering business, Caviar for Teams.
Neither company disclosed financial terms of the deal, but the plan is for Caviar and Zesty to operate independently in the short term.
“Restaurants turn to Caviar to reach more diners and grow their businesses,” Square Caviar Lead Gokul Rajaram said in a press release. “Expanding our corporate catering product with Zesty enables us to offer our restaurant partners another way to boost sales through higher-margin, large-format catering orders,” said Rajaram, Caviar Lead at Square. “Caviar is thriving, and we’re excited to supercharge its success with Zesty and double down on an area with great opportunity to drive more growth for our business.”
Since its acquisition of Caviar in 2014, Square has acquired OrderAhead’s pickup business to launch Caviar Pickup and Entrees On-Trays to expand its footprint in the Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas area.
Zesty currently partners with about 150 restaurants in San Francisco, which is the only city in which it operates. Some of Zesty’s customers include Snap, Splunk and TechCrunch. Zesty, which first launched in 2013 under a different name, had previously raised $20.7 million in venture funding.
“Adding Zesty’s offerings, like sophisticated menu-planning tools and algorithms, white-glove catering services, and nutrition and allergen customization, will help us expand our catering offering and even better serve companies of all sizes,” the Caviar team wrote on Medium. “Plus, it provides our restaurant partners with more opportunities to reach new corporate customers.”
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Voicera scoops up AI note-taking app Wrappup
Voicera wants to be the company that eliminates the need for human note taking once and for all. Their vision is an AI-driven voice recognition system that not only takes notes, but identifies speakers and summarizes key points and action items. Today, the company announced it had acquired a similar startup, Wrappup, an AI-fueled note taking app that fits in nicely with that vision.
The Wrappup team is joining Voicera immediately. Terms were not disclosed.
Voicera CEO Omar Tawakol certainly saw the fit. “Both companies approached the problem with meetings in synergistic ways. Wrappup’s mobile-first, in-person meeting product complements and extends Voicera’s initial focus on conference calls,” he said in a statement.
Wrappup’s special strength it turns out it is identifying the salient points in a meeting in a mobile context. To that end, the company also announced the launch of a new mobile app. Chances are this combining of these two companies has been in the works for some time, and is just being made official today.
Photo: Voicera
Wrappup CEO Rami Salman says joining forces with Voicera creates a more compelling and powerful solution for customers. “Our combined tech stack and AI algorithms more accurately identify and summarize important moments from all your meetings, regardless of where they are held,” he said in a statement.
Voicera’s voice recognition tool is a cloud service called Eva. It is designed to remove the task of note taking from the meeting experience. The company got a $13.5 million Series A last month from some big-time investors, including e.ventures, Battery Ventures, GGV Capital and Greycroft. They also got some attention from enterprise corporate venture investors, including GV (the investment firm affiliated with Google), Microsoft Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and Workday Ventures. The level of these investors shows the company is attacking a real pain point for meeting attendees.
Wrappup is based in Dubai and was founded in 2015. It has raised $800,000 to date. It works with existing meeting tools, including GoToMeeting from Citrix, WebEx from Cisco, UberConference and Zoom.
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Utah’s Pluralsight unveils IPO filing
Pluralsight, the Utah-based education technology company, has revealed its IPO filing.
Given the timing of the unveiling, the company is likely targeting a May public debut.
Its core business is online software development courses, helping people improve their skills in categories like IT, data and security. Businesses small and large pay Pluralsight to help train their employees. It also has offerings for individual subscribers.
In the filing, the company acknowledges that it is a competitive landscape, and names Cornerstone OnDemand, Udacity, Udemy, LinkedIn Learning as others in a comparable market. It also mentions General Assembly, which was recently acquired by Adecco for $413 million.
This is the first glimpse we get at Pluralsight’s financials. For 2017, the company brought in $166.8 million in revenue, up from $131.8 million in 2016 and $108.4 million in 2015.
Losses are growing, however. This is partly due to a sizeable increase in sales and marketing expenditures. For 2017, the company lost $96.5 million. This is up from losses of $20.6 million in 2016 and $26.4 million in 2015.
Pluralsight has been around since 2004. Like many startups outside of the San Francisco Bay Area, the company bootstrapped its business and didn’t raise significant outside funding until 2013. Pluralsight previously raised nearly $200 million in financing.
The largest shareholder is Insight Venture Partners, which owned 46.1 percent of the shares prior to the IPO, an unusually high percentage. Co-founder and CEO Aaron Skonnard owned 13.4 percent and investment group ICONIQ owned 8.1 percent.
Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan served as lead underwriters. Wilson Sonsini and Goodwin Procter served as counsel.
Pluralsight plans to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker “PS.”
A provision in the JOBS Act from 2012 helped make it so that companies could file confidentially and then reveal financials and other business information just weeks before making public debuts. This helps companies avoid too much scrutiny in the months leading up to an IPO. There is also a quiet period in this time, meaning that companies are limited in what they can say publicly about their businesses.
Like most tech companies, Pluralsight chose to take advantage of this confidential filing provision. But it also announced that it filed, something that companies don’t usually do. Most choose to stay quiet about IPO plans until they make the filings public, unless reporters break the news first.
It was no surprise to those who have been following Utah’s tech scene that Pluralsight is planning to list on the stock market this year. The venture-backed “unicorn” has been a late-stage company for several years now, with a reported valuation of $1 billion as of 2014.
After a slow first couple of months, there has been a flurry of tech IPO activity in recent weeks. Dropbox, Spotify and Zuora recently debuted. Pivotal, Smartsheet and Carbon Black are amongst the companies expected to list in the coming weeks.
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Zuora’s IPO is another step in golden age of enterprise SaaS
Zuroa’s founder and CEO Tien Tzuo had a vision of a subscription economy long before most people ever considered the notion. He knew that for companies to succeed with subscriptions, they needed a bookkeeping system that understood how they collected and reported money. The company went public yesterday, another clear sign post on the road to SaaS maturation.
Tzuo was an early employee at Salesforce and their first CMO. He worked there in the early days in the late 90s when Salesforce’s Marc Benioff famously rented an apartment to launch the company. Tzuo was at Salesforce 9 years, and it helped him understand the nature of subscription-based businesses like Salesforce.
“We created a great environment for building, marketing and delivering software. We rewrote the rules, the way it was built, marketed and sold,” Tzuo told me in an interview in 2016.
He saw a fundamental problem with traditional accounting methods, which were designed for selling a widget and declaring the revenue. A subscription was an entirely different model and it required a new way to track revenue and communicate with customers. Tzuo took the long view when he started his company in early 2007, leaving a secure job at a growing company like Salesforce.
He did it because he had the vision, long before anyone else, that SaaS companies would require a subscription bookkeeping system, but before long, so would other unrelated businesses.
Building a subscription system
As he put it in that 2016 interview, if you commit to pay me $1 for 10 years, you know that $1 was coming in come hell or high water, that’s $10 I know I’m getting, but I can’t declare the money until I get it. That recurring revenue still has value though because my investors know that I’m secure for 10 years, even though it’s not on the books yet. That’s where Zuora came in. It could account for that recurring revenue when nobody else could. What’s more, it could track the billing over time, and send out reminders, help the companies stay engaged with their customers.
Photo: Lukas Kurka/Getty Images
As Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research put it, they pioneered the whole idea of a subscription economy, and not just for SaaS companies. Over the last several years, we’ve heard companies talking about selling services and SLAs (service/uptime agreements) instead of a one-time sale of an item, but not that long ago it wasn’t something a lot of companies were thinking about.
“They pioneered how companies can think about monetization,” Wang said. “So large companies like a GE could go from selling a wind turbine one time to selling a subscription to deliver a certain number of Kw/hr of green energy at peak hours from 1 to 5 pm with 98 percent uptime.” There wasn’t any way to do this before Zuora came along.
Jason Lemkin, founder at SaaStr, a firm that invests in SaaS startups, says Tzuo was a genuine visionary and helped create the underlying system for SaaS subscriptions to work. “The most interesting part of Zuora is that it is a “second” order SaaS play. It could only thrive once SaaS became mainstream, and could only scale on top of other recurring revenue businesses. Zuora started off as a niche player helping SaaS companies do billing, and it dramatically expanded and thrived as SaaS became … Software.”
Market catches up with idea
When he launched the company in 2007, perhaps he saw that extension of his idea out on the distant horizon. He certainly saw companies like Salesforce needing a service like the one he had decided to create. The early investors must have recognized that his vision was early and it would take a slow, steady climb on the way to exiting. It took 11 years and $242 million in venture capital before they saw the payoff. The revenue after 11 years was a reported $167 million. There is plenty of room to grow.
But yesterday the company had its initial public offering, and it was by any measure a huge success. According TechCrunch’s Katie Roof, “After pricing its IPO at $14 and raising $154 million, the company closed at $20, valuing the company around $2 billion.” Today it was up a bit more as of this writing.
When you consider the Tzuo’s former company has become a $10 billion company, that companies like Box, Zendesk, Workday and Dropbox have all gone public, and others like DocuSign and Smartsheet are not far behind, it’s pretty clear that we are in a golden age of SaaS — and chances are it’s only going to get better.
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InVision acquires design visibility tool Wake
InVision, the NY-based design platform focused on collaboration, has today announced the acquisition of Wake.
Wake is a design tool focused squarely on supporting design visibility throughout a particular organization. Wake allows companies to share design assets and view work in progress as designers build out their screens, logos, or other designs. Design team leaders, or other higher-ups at the company, can upvote certain design projects or give feedback on specific tweaks.
InVision CEO Clark Valberg said that one of the most attractive features of Wake is that sharing on the Wake platform was implicit, rather than on InVision where designers have to take an extra step to upload their prototypes on InVision.
Wake will continue to operate independently within InVision, and Valberg has plans to integrate some of the Wake tools into the InVision core product. Moreover, as part of the deal, Wake will be introducing a free tier.
“We’re in the midst of a shift,” said CEO Clark Valberg. “The screen is the most important place in the world. Every company is now a digital product company. The world of design is growing and the Wake product represents a very interesting philosophical vector of that market.”
The entire Wake team will join InVision. Wake was founded in 2013 by Chris Kalani and Johan Bakken, with a customer list that includes Capital One, Spotify, Palantir, Stripe, and Airbnb. In fact, InVision’s Valberg said that Wake’s customer overlap with InVision was one of the first things that alerted InVision to Wake.
Wake has raised a total of $3.8 million, with investments from First Round and Designer Fund.
The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
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Smartsheet files for IPO
Smartsheet is the latest company to file to go public, now that the IPO window is open.
The Bellevue, Washington-based company offers enterprise software for communication and collaboration.
It describes itself as the “leading cloud-based platform for work execution, enabling teams and organizations to plan, capture, manage, automate, and report on work at scale, resulting in more efficient processes and better business outcomes. ”
Smartsheet says it has 3.6 million users and its products are utilized at 90% of the Fortune 100 companies around the world.
It touts clients like Cisco and Starbucks. Smartsheet says Cisco uses it to keep tabs on spending and Starbucks uses it send product and business updates to its thousands of stores.
The company brought in $111.3 million in revenue for its fiscal 2018 year. It’s a big jump from $67 million for 2017 and $40.8 million for 2016.
But losses are also growing, totaling $49.1 million for 2018, up from negative $15.2 million and $14.3 million in prior years.
“We have a history of cumulative losses and we cannot assure you that we will achieve profitability in the foreseeable future,” the company warned in its prospectus.
Smartsheet acknowledges that it competes with Microsoft and Google on spreadsheets and other productivity tools. Its products also compete with Asana, Atlassian, Planview and Workfront.
“The market in which we participate is highly competitive, and if we do not compete effectively, our operating results could be harmed,” reads the “risk factors” section of the filing.
The largest shareholder is Insight Venture Partners, which owns a sizable 32.1% of the company heading into its IPO. Madrona Ventures owns 28.4% of the company, and Sutter Hill Ventures owns 5.4%.
Smartsheet had raised at least $106 million in venture funding, dating back to 2010, according to Crunchbase data. Last year, TechCrunch reported that it had an $800 million valuation.
The company plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange, under the ticker “SMAR.”
Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan are managing the offering. Fenwick & West and Wilson Sonsini served as counsel.
The floodgates have opened for enterprise tech IPOs. Last week we saw Dropbox debut and now we’ve seen filings for Zuora and Pivotal. DocuSign is also expected to file in the coming months.
Many of last year’s enterprise tech IPOs performed well, giving pipeline companies confidence in their debuts.
Spring also tends to be an active time for IPOs, with companies looking to debut before the summer slowdown.
And while consumer tech IPOs have been slow for several years now, one of the more anticipated companies looking to debut is Spotify, which is expected to go public next week via a “direct listing.”
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Why unicorns falter
In early February 2016, a study of financing deals reported by The Wall Street Journal found that investors are increasingly protecting themselves from IPOs that don’t perform as expected. This fallout is a continuation of the demise of the so-called “unicorn,” a tech startup with a pre-IPO valuation of over one billion dollars. Read More
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