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EverAfter closes $13M to help companies ride off into the sunset with their customers

EverAfter secured $13 million in seed funding to continue developing its no-code customer-facing tool that streamlines onboarding and retention and enables business-to-business clients to embed personalized customer portals within any product.

The Tel Aviv-based company was founded in 2020 by Noa Danon and Tal Shemesh. CEO Danon, who comes from a project management background, said they saw a disconnect between the user and product experience.

The company’s name, EverAfter, comes from the concept that in SaaS companies, someone has to be in charge of the “EverAfter,” with customers, even as the relationship changes, Danon told TechCrunch.

Via its no-code platform, customer success teams are able to build a website in weeks using drop-and-drag widgets like training materials, timelines, task management and meeting summaries, and then configure what each user sees. Then there is a snippet of code that is embedded into the product.

EverAfter also integrates with existing customer relationship management, project management and service ticket tools, while also updating Salesforce and HubSpot directly through an interface.

“It’s like the customer owns a piece of real estate inside the product,” Danon said.

TLV Partners and Vertex Ventures co-led the round and were joined by angel investors Benny Shneider, Zohar Gilon and Amit Gilon.

Yanai Oron, general partner at Vertex Ventures, said he is seeing best-in-breed companies try to solve customer churn or improve the relationship process on their own and failing, which speaks to the complexity of the problem.

Startups in this space are coming online and raising money, but with EverAfter, they are differentiating themselves by not only putting a dashboard on their product, but launching with the capabilities to manage thousands of customers using the product, he added.

“I’ve been tracking the customer success space over the past few years, and it is a growing field with the least sophisticated tools,” Oron said. “During COVID, companies realized it was easier to retain customers rather than get new ones. We are all used to more self-service and wanting to get the answer ourselves, and customers are the same. Companies also started to be more at ease in letting customers develop things on their own and leave R&D departments to do other things.”

Clients include Taboola, AppsFlyer and Verbit, with Verbit reporting its company’s customer success managers save 10 hours a week managing ongoing customer communication by using EverAfter, Danon added. This comes as CallMiner reports that unplanned customer churn costs companies $35.3 billion in the U.S. alone.

EverAfter offers both customer success and partner management software and clients can choose a high-touch service or kits and templates for self-service.

The new funding will enable the company to focus on integration and expansion into additional use cases. Since being founded, EverAfter has grown to 20 employees and 30 customers. The founders also want to utilize the data they are collecting on what works and doesn’t work for each customer.

“There are so many interesting things that happen between companies and customers, from onboarding to business reviews, and we are going to expand on those,” Danon said. “We want to be the first thing companies put inside their product to figure out the relationship between customers and customer success teams and managers.”

 

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Equity Monday: Clubhouse, Taboola and why the SPAC wave will get worse

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here — and make sure to check out last week’s main ep, which was super-packed and a real treat.

This morning the news was heavy, so here’s your rundown to get you into the show:

Hugs, and we are back Thursday, if not before. Stay safe!

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple PodcastsOvercastSpotify and all the casts.

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Taboola is going public via SPAC

Taboola is the latest company seeking to go public via special purpose acquisition company — more commonly known as a SPAC.

To achieve this, it will merge with ION Acquisition Corp., which went public in 2020 with the aim of funding an Israeli tech acquisition (Haaretz reported last month that Taboola was in talks with ION). The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter, and the combined company will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol TBLA.

Founded in 2007, Taboola powers content recommendation widgets (and advertising on those widgets) across 9,000 websites for publishers including CNBC, NBC News, Business Insider, The Independent and El Mundo. It says it reaches 516 million daily active users while working with more than 13,000 advertisers.

The company had previously planned to merge with competitor Outbrain before the deal was canceled last fall, with sources pointing to the market impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, a “challenging culture fit” and regulatory issues to explain the deal’s end.

Taboola’s founder and CEO Adam Singolda (pictured above, left) told me that this didn’t lead directly to the SPAC deal. But he said, “I always wanted to go public,” which wasn’t possible while the merger was in the works. Once that deal was called off, and with 2020 turning out to be a strong year for Taboola — it’s projecting revenue of $1.2 billion, including $375 million ex-TAC revenue (revenue after paying publishers), with over $100 million in adjusted EBITDA — the time seemed right, and ION seemed like the right partner.

“We believe Taboola is an open web recommendation leader which is well positioned to challenge the walled gardens,” said ION CEO Gilad Shany in a statement. “We were looking to merge with a global technology leader with Israeli DNA and we found that in Taboola. The combination of long-term partnerships built by the company with thousands of open web digital properties, their direct access to advertisers, massive global reach and proven AI technology, allows Taboola to provide significant value to their partners while also achieving attractive unit economics as the company grows.”

The deal will value Taboola at $2.6 billion. Through this transaction, the company plans to raise a total of $545 million, including $285 million in PIPE financing secured from Fidelity Management & Research Company, Baron Capital Group, funds and accounts managed by Hedosophia, the Federated Hermes Kaufmann Funds and others.

Singolda said that the company plans to invest $100 million in R&D this year, and that he hopes to expand the technology into areas like e-commerce and TV advertising, with the goal of moving “beyond the browser.” More broadly, he said he wants Taboola to be “a strong public company that champions the open web.”

“The open web is a $64 billion advertising market [according to Taboola estimates], but there’s no Google for the open web,” he said.

Yes, Google itself spends plenty of time talking about similar ideas, but Singolda argued that while Google has consumer products like search and YouTube that compete with other publishers for time and attention, “Taboola is not in the consumer business … We serve our partners, and it’s in our identity to drive audience growth, engagement and revenue.”

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Daily Crunch: Taboola and Outbrain call off their merger

A massive content recommendation merger falls apart, Microsoft reveals the release date and pricing for its flagship game console and Alexa enables phone calls for AT&T customers. This is your Daily Crunch for September 9, 2020.

The big story: Taboola and Outbrain call off their merger

Looks like the two biggest companies in the content recommendation market won’t be teaming up after all.

Taboola and Outbrain announced an $850 million merger last year, but apparently a “challenging cultural fit” and the financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the digital ad business have scuttled the deal. There’s been no formal announcement yet, but TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden has confirmed the news with both companies.

“We’ve seen changing conditions in the market due to COVID-19, and we decided to terminate the deal,” an anonymous source told us.

The tech giants

Microsoft confirms $499 Xbox Series X arrives November 10, pre-orders begin September 22 — We mentioned a new, scaled-down Xbox yesterday, but Microsoft announced today that the flagship Xbox Series X is arriving on November 10.

AT&T customers can now make and receive calls via Alexa — Once enabled, customers with supported devices will be able to speak to the Alexa digital assistant to start a phone call or answer an incoming call.

Snapchat’s new Lens celebrates tomorrow’s NFL kickoff — Snap and the NFL recently announced a multi-year extension to their content partnership.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Yubico unveils its latest YubiKey 5C NFC security key, priced at $55 — The company says this new security key offers the strongest defenses against some of the most common cyberattacks.

Xometry raises $75M Series E to expand custom manufacturing marketplace — The company has built an online marketplace where businesses can find manufacturers across the world with excess capacity to build whatever they need.

Rick Moranis breaks acting hiatus for 30 seconds to launch Mint’s $30 a month unlimited plan — Why? Who knows!

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

As direct listing looms, Palantir insiders are accelerating stock sales — Danny Crichton examines how insiders perceive Palantir’s value.

Shift’s George Arison shares 6 tips for taking your company public via a SPAC — Shift has nearly completed the SPAC process.

Slack’s earnings detail how COVID-19 is both a help and a hindrance to cloud growth — Alex Wilhelm looks at Slack’s latest numbers.

(Reminder: Extra Crunch is our subscription membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

Watch the first trailer for the insanely star-studded ‘Dune’ — Sandworms, ahoy!

Learn how to build a service marketplace from the CTOs of Peloton and DoorDash at Disrupt — The connected fitness platform and food delivery app have both built massive service businesses that touch millions of consumers.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

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