Surveys
Auto Added by WPeMatico
The TechCrunch Germany Survey — Calling Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Bielefeld, Frankfurt
TechCrunch is embarking on a major new project to survey European founders and investors in cities outside the larger European capitals.
Over the next few weeks, we will ask entrepreneurs in these cities to talk about their ecosystems, in their own words.
This is your chance to put Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Bielefeld and Frankfurt on the TechCrunch Map!
If you are a tech startup founder or investor in these cities please fill out the survey form here.
We are particularly interested in hearing from women founders and investors.
This is the follow-up to the huge survey of investors we’ve done over the last six or more months, largely in capital cities.
These formed part of a broader series of surveys we’re doing regularly for Extra Crunch, our subscription service that unpacks key issues for startups and investors.
In the first wave of surveys, the cities we wrote about were largely capitals. You can see them listed here.
This time, we will be surveying founders and investors in Europe’s other cities to capture how European hubs are growing, from the perspective of the people on the ground.
We’d like to know how your city’s startup scene is evolving, how the tech sector is being impacted by COVID-19 and generally how your city will evolve.
We leave submissions mostly unedited and are generally looking for at least one or two paragraphs in answer to the questions.
So if you are a tech startup founder or investor in one of these cities please fill out our survey form here.
Thank you for participating. If you have questions you can email mike@techcrunch.com and/or reply on Twitter to @mikebutcher.
Powered by WPeMatico
Employee survey startup Culture Amp closes $82M round led by Sequoia China
Each unhappy startup may be unhappy in its own way, but there’s still wisdom in understanding what drives employee satisfaction and dissatisfaction across companies.
Culture Amp is just one of the companies aiming to help employees anonymously express how they feel about their place of work, but the Melbourne company is using the anonymized employee survey data from thousands of customers to help them learn from each other and chart which initiatives made a dent.
The eight-year-old startup has picked up a new bout of funding to help it extend its base of customers further.
Culture Amp just closed a sizable $82 million funding round led by Sequoia Capital China with participation from Sapphire Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Index Ventures, Blackbird Ventures, Hostplus, Skip Capital, Grok Ventures, Global Founders Capital and TDM Growth Partners.
The company’s Series E doubles the company’s total funding raised to date, which now sits at $158 million. Culture Amp closed its last major round of funding — a $40 million Series D — in July of last year.
The company’s subscription survey software gives customers all of the templates, questions and analytics that they need to track employee sentiment and visualize the data that they get back. The software can be used for things like quarterly engagement surveys, but it can also power performance reviews, goal-setting and self-reflections.
Employee surveys are certainly nothing revolutionary, but Culture Amp is trying to improve the process by helping its customers start to bring anonymous feedback to the team level so that employees can give more direct feedback to their managers.
CEO Didier Elzinga tells me the company now has 2,500 customers with a collective 3 million Culture Amp employee surveys under their belts. Elzinga tells TechCrunch that harnessing the collective intelligence of its network to predict things like employee turnover is perhaps one of its strongest value propositions.
“Once you understand the experience that people are having, once you know where you should focus, how do we actually help you act on it?” he tells TechCrunch. “A large part is bringing to bear the collective intelligence of the thousands of companies we already have so that you can learn from people that have suffered from the same sorts of problems.”
The 400-person company’s customers include McDonald’s, Salesforce, Slack and Airbnb.
Powered by WPeMatico
SAP agrees to buy Qualtrics for $8B in cash, just before the survey software company’s IPO
Ryan Smith of Qualtrics speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2015
Enterprise software giant SAP announced today that it has agreed to acquire Qualtrics for $8 billion in cash, just before the survey and research software company was set to go public. The deal is expected to be completed in the first half of 2019. Qualtrics last round of venture capital funding in 2016 raised $180 million at a $2.5 billion valuation.
This is the second-largest ever acquisition of a SaaS company, after Oracle’s purchase of Netsuite for $9.3 billion in 2016.
In a conference call, SAP CEO Bill McDermott said Qualtrics’ IPO was already oversubscribed and that the two companies began discussions a few months ago. SAP claims its software touches 77 percent of the world’s transaction revenue, while Qualtrics’ products include survey software that enables its 9,000 enterprise users to gauge things like customer sentiment and employee engagement.
McDermott compared the potential impact of combining SAP’s operational data with Qualtrics’ customer and user data to Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram. “The legacy players who carried their ‘90s technology into the 21st century just got clobbered. We have made existing participants in the market extinct,” he said. (SAP’s competitors include Oracle, Salesforce.com, Microsoft, and IBM.)
SAP, whose global headquarters is in Walldorf, Germany, said it has secured financing of €7 billion (about $7.93 billion) to cover acquisition-related costs and the purchase price, which will include unvested employee bonuses and cash on the balance sheet at close.
Ryan Smith, who co-founded Qualtrics in 2002, will continue to serve as its CEO. After the acquisition is finalized, the company will become part of SAP’s Cloud Business Group, but retain its dual headquarters in Provo, Utah and Seattle, as well as its own branding and personnel.
According to Crunchbase, the company raised a total of $400 million in VC funding from investors including Accel, Sequoia, and Insight Ventures. It had intended to sell 20.5 million shares in its debut for $18 to $21, which could have potentially grossed up to about $495 million. This would have put its valuation between $3.9 billion to $4.5 billion, according to CrunchBase’s Alex Wilhelm.
This year, Qualtrics’ revenue grew 8.5 percent from $97.1 million in the second-quarter to $105.4 million in the third-quarter, according to its IPO filing. It reported third-quarter GAAP net income of $4.9 million. That represented an increase from the $975,000 it reported in the previous quarter, as well as its net profit in the same period a year ago of $4.7 million. Qualtrics grew its operating cash flow to $52.5 million in the first nine months of 2018, compared to $36.1 million during the same period in 2017.
In today’s announcement, Qualtrics said it expects its full-year 2018 revenue to exceed $400 million and forecasts a forward growth rate of more than 40 percent, not counting the potential synergies of its acquisition by SAP.
Qualtrics’ main competitors include SurveyMonkey, which went public in September.
Powered by WPeMatico
Knotch has patented its color-based feedback system
Knotch promises marketers a better way to collect user feedback about the effectiveness of their sponsored content. Now it’s announcing that it has received a design patent for its approach. Basically, when a sponsored article uses Knotch, a survey question pops up at the end, which is supposed to help advertisers assess your state of mind after reading the article. The big difference… Read More
Powered by WPeMatico
Former Grooveshark Execs Raise $950K For E-Commerce Customer Intelligence Startup Tandem
A team of early Grooveshark employees who left the company a couple of years ago to pursue their own startup ambitions have raised a little under a million for Tandem, a service that helps e-commerce companies better understand their customers shopping behavior and interests by combining analytics data, surveys and sales information. Explains co-founder and CEO Isaac Moredock, previously… Read More
Powered by WPeMatico