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Ken Babcock and his co-founders, Dan Giovacchini and Brian Shultz, were in the midst of Harvard Business School in March 2020 when they felt the call to start Tango, a Chrome extension that auto-captures workflow best practices so that teams can learn from their top performers.
“This window of opportunity was driven by the pandemic as we saw a lot of companies become distributed and go remote,” CEO Babcock told TechCrunch. “Team leaders were remotely onboarding people, for perhaps the first time, and accelerating ramp times. There was no longer the opportunity to tap on people’s shoulders in the office, so much of the training was left to people’s own devices.”
They dropped out of their program to start Los Angeles-based Tango, and today, announced a $5.7 million seed round for its workflow intelligence platform. Wing Venture Capital led the round and was joined by General Catalyst, Global Silicon Valley, Outsiders Fund and Red Sea Ventures. A group of angel investors also joined, including former Yelp executive Michael Stoppelman, former Uber head of data Jai Ranganathan, KeepTruckin CEO Shoaib Makani and Awesome People Ventures’ Julia Lipton.
Tango is designed to help employees, particularly in customer success and sales enablement, get back as much as 20% of their workweek spent searching for that one piece of information or tracking down the right colleague to assist with a task. Its technology creates tutorials by recording a users’ workflow — actions, links to pages, URLs and screenshots — and turns that into step-by-step documentation with a video.
Previously the co-founders bootstrapped the company, and decided to go after seed funding to expand the product and growth teams and invest in product development so that Tango could take a product-led growth strategy, Babcock said. The team now has 13 employees.
Since starting last year, Tango has secured 10 pilots to figure out the data and capabilities before it is set to launch publicly in September. Babcock said the company will always have a free version of the product, as well as premium and enterprise versions that will unlock additional capabilities.
“The big thing is around integrations and meeting people where the consumer content is,” Babcock added. “We are reducing that burden of creating documentation, and for companies that already have Wikis or other materials, learning how to inject ourselves into those systems.”
Zach DeWitt, partner at Wing Venture Capital, said he met the company three years ago through a mutual friend.
His firm invests in early-stage, business-to-business startups unlocking a novel data set. In Tango’s case, the company was creating a new data set for the enterprise and business, where users can analyze workflow.
With the average tech company using 150 SaaS apps, up from 20 a decade ago, there are permutations about which app to use, how to use them, what happens if the user gets stuck and what if none of the data is being captured, Dewitt said. Tango works in the background and captures workflow, which is the foundation to the business’ success.
“I was blown away by the approach,” he added. “You have to meet people where they get stuck and even anticipate where they get stuck so you can serve the Tango tutorial to get unstuck. It can also change the company’s culture when it rewards people to share knowledge. The whole idea is beneficial to multiple parties: to those who are getting stuck and to new hires. That is powerful.”
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Less than six months after raising $55 million in a Series C round of funding, SMB 401(k) provider Human Interest today announced it has raised $200 million in a round that propels it to unicorn status.
The Rise Fund, TPG’s global impact investing platform, led the round and was joined by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. The financing included participation from new investor Crosslink Capital and existing backers NewView Capital, Glynn Capital, U.S. Venture Partners, Wing Venture Capital, Uncork Capital, Slow Capital, Susa Ventures and others.
Over the past year, the San Francisco-based company has raised $305 million. With the latest financing, it has now raised a total of $336.7 million since its 2015 inception.
The company admittedly has an IPO in its sights, as evidenced by the appointment of former Yodlee CFO Mike Armsby to the role of CFO at Human Interest. It’s targeting a traditional IPO sometime in 2023, with execs saying the target is to have “$200 million+ in run-rate revenue before going public.” Currently, it’s at “tens of millions of run-rate revenue” now, and adding millions of new revenue each month.
Human Interest’s digital retirement benefits platform allows users “to launch a retirement plan in minutes and put it on autopilot,” according to the company. It also touts that it has eliminated all 401(k) transaction fees.
Demand for 401(k)s by SMBs appears to be at an all-time high, with Human Interest reporting that its sales tripled over the last year. The company has also more than doubled its headcount over the last 12 months to 350 employees.
The startup said it is seeing strong adoption in verticals that have not previously had retirement benefits, including construction, retail, manufacturing, restaurants, nonprofits and hospitality. For example, over the past three quarters, Human Interest has seen 4.5x customer growth in the restaurant sector. Since the start of the pandemic, Human Interest has experienced 2x higher enrollment growth among hourly workers than salaried workers, and hourly worker assets have tripled.
“Promoting financial health is a core investment pillar for The Rise Fund. Human Interest delivers one of the most compelling solutions to the persistent problem that roughly half of Americans will not have enough savings when they reach retirement age,” said Maya Chorengel, co-managing partner at The Rise Fund, in a written statement. “Despite recent legislation, primarily at the state level, legacy programs have not, to date, produced the same participant outcomes as Human Interest.”
The company said it will be using its new capital to expand its network of integrations and partnerships with financial advisers, benefits brokers and payroll companies. It also expects to, naturally, do some hiring –– another 200 employees by year’s end, primarily in its product, engineering and revenue teams.
The 401(k) for SMB space is heating up as of late. In June, competitor Guideline also raised $200 million in a round led by General Atlantic.
Additional details around the IPO and revenue were added post-publication.
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Many companies spend a significant amount of money and resources processing data from logs, traces and metrics, forcing them to make trade-offs about how much to collect and store. Hydrolix, an early-stage startup, announced a $10 million seed round today to help tackle logging at scale, while using unique technology to lower the cost of storing and querying this data.
Wing Venture Capital led the round with help from AV8 Ventures, Oregon Venture Fund and Silicon Valley Data Capital.
Company CEO and co-founder Marty Kagan noted that in his previous roles, he saw organizations with tons of data in logs, metrics and traces that could be valuable to various parts of the company, but most organizations couldn’t afford the high cost to maintain these records for very long due to the incredible volume of data involved. He started Hydrolix because he wanted to change the economics to make it easier to store and query this valuable data.
“The classic problem with these cluster-based databases is that they’ve got locally attached storage. So as the data set gets larger, you have no choice but to either spend a ton of money to grow your cluster or separate your hot and cold data to keep your costs under control,” Kagan told me.
What’s more, he says that when it comes to querying, the solutions out there like BigQuery and Snowflake are not well-suited for this kind of data. “They rely really heavily on caching and bulk column scans, so they’re not really useful for […] these infrastructure plays where you want to do livestream ingest, and you want to be able to do ad hoc data exploration,” he said.
Hydrolix wanted to create a more cost-effective way of storing and querying log data, while solving these issues with other tooling. “So we built a new storage layer which delivers […] SSD-like performance using nothing but cloud storage and diskless spot instances,” Kagan explained. He says that this means that there is no caching or column scales, enabling them to do index searches. “You’re getting the low cost, unlimited retention benefits of cloud storage, but with the interactive performance of fully indexed search,” he added.
Peter Wagner, founding partner at investor Wing Venture Capital, says that the beauty of this tool is that it eliminates trade-offs, while lowering customers’ overall data processing costs. “The Hydrolix team has built a real-time data platform optimized not only to deliver superior performance at a fraction of the cost of current analytics solutions, but one architected to offer those same advantages as data volumes grow by orders of magnitude,” Wagner said in a statement.
It’s worth pointing out that in the past couple of weeks SentinelOne bought high-speed logging platform Scalyr for $155 million, then CrowdStrike grabbed Humio, another high-speed logging tool for $400 million, so this category is getting attention.
The product is currently compatible with AWS and offered through the Amazon Marketplace, but Kagan says they are working on versions for Azure and Google Cloud and expect to have those available later this year. The company was founded at the end of 2018 and currently has 20 employees spread out over six countries, with headquarters in Portland, Oregon.
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Today, that software is offered as a cloud service should be pretty much considered a given. Certainly any modern tooling is going to be SaaS, and as companies and employees add services, it becomes a management nightmare. Enter Torii, an early-stage startup that wants to make it easier to manage SaaS bloat.
Today, the company announced a $10 million Series A investment led by Wing Venture Capital, with participation from prior investors Entree Capital, Global Founders Capital, Scopus Ventures and Uncork Capital. The investment brings the total raised to $15 million, according to the company. Under the terms of the deal, Wing partner Jake Flomenberg is joining the board.
Uri Haramati, co-founder and CEO, is a serial entrepreneur who helped launch Houseparty and Meerkat. As a serial founder, he says that he and his co-founders saw firsthand how difficult it was to manage their companies’ SaaS applications, and the idea for Torii developed from that.
“We all felt the changes around SaaS and managing the tools that we were using. We were all early adopters of SaaS. We all [took advantage of SaaS] to scale our companies and we felt the same thing: The fact is that you just can’t add more people who manage more software, it just doesn’t scale,” Haramati told me.
He said they started Torii with the idea of using software to control the SaaS sprawl they were experiencing. At the heart of the idea was an automation engine to discover and manage all of the SaaS tools inside an organization. Once you know what you have, there is a no-code workflow engine to create workflows around those tools for key activities like onboarding or offboarding employees.
Torii Workflow Engine. Image Credits: Torii
The approach seems to be working. As the pandemic struck in 2020, more companies than ever needed to control and understand the SaaS tooling they had, and revenue grew 400% YoY last year. Customers include Delivery Hero, Chewy, Monday.com and Palo Alto Networks.
The company also doubled its employees from a dozen with which they started last year, with plans to get to 60 people by the end of this year. As they do that, as experienced entrepreneurs, Haramati told me they already understood the value of developing a diverse and inclusive workforce, certainly around gender. Today, the team is 25 people with 10 being women and they are working to improve those ratios as they continue to add new people.
Flomenberg invested in Torii because he was particularly impressed with the automation aspect of the company and how it took a holistic approach to the SaaS management problem, rather than attempting to solve one part of it. “When I met Uri, he described this vision. It was really to become the operating system for SaaS. It all starts with the right data. You can trust data that is gathered from [multiple] sources to really build the right picture and pull it together. And then they took all those signals and they built a platform that is built on automation,” he said.
Haramati admits that it’s challenging to scale in the midst of a pandemic, but the company is growing and is already working to expand the platform to include product recommendations and help with compliance and cost control.
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Pinecone, a new startup from the folks who helped launch Amazon SageMaker, has built a vector database that generates data in a specialized format to help build machine learning applications faster, something that was previously only accessible to the largest organizations. Today the company came out of stealth with a new product and announced a $10 million seed investment led by Wing Venture Capital.
Company co-founder Edo Liberty says that he started the company because of this fundamental belief that the industry was being held back by the lack of wider access to this type of database. “The data that a machine learning model expects isn’t a JSON record, it’s a high dimensional vector that is either a list of features or what’s called an embedding that’s a numerical representation of the items or the objects in the world. This [format] is much more semantically rich and actionable for machine learning,” he explained.
He says that this is a concept that is widely understood by data scientists, and supported by research, but up until now only the biggest and technically superior companies like Google or Pinterest could take advantage of this difference. Liberty and his team created Pinecone to put that kind of technology in reach of any company.
The startup spent the last couple of years building the solution, which consists of three main components. The main piece is a vector engine to convert the data into this machine-learning ingestible format. Liberty says that this is the piece of technology that contains all the data structures and algorithms that allow them to index very large amounts of high dimensional vector data, and search through it in an efficient and accurate way.
The second is a cloud hosted system to apply all of that converted data to the machine learning model, while handling things like index lookups along with the pre- and post-processing — everything a data science team needs to run a machine learning project at scale with very large workloads and throughputs. Finally, there is a management layer to track all of this and manage data transfer between source locations.
One classic example Liberty uses is an eCommerce recommendation engine. While this has been a standard part of online selling for years, he believes using a vectorized data approach will result in much more accurate recommendations and he says the data science research data bears him out.
“It used to be that deploying [something like a recommendation engine] was actually incredibly complex, and […] if you have access to a production grade database, 90% of the difficulty and heavy lifting in creating those solutions goes away, and that’s why we’re building this. We believe it’s the new standard,” he said.
The company currently has 10 people including the founders, but the plan is to double or even triple that number, depending on how the year goes. As he builds his company as an immigrant founder — Liberty is from Israel — he says that diversity is top of mind. He adds that it’s something he worked hard on at his previous positions at Yahoo and Amazon as he was building his teams at those two organizations. One way he is doing that is in the recruitment process. “We have instructed our recruiters to be proactive [in finding more diverse applicants], making sure they don’t miss out on great candidates, and that they bring us a diverse set of candidates,” he said.
Looking ahead to post-pandemic, Liberty says he is a bit more traditional in terms of office versus home, and that he hopes to have more in-person interactions. “Maybe I’m old fashioned but I like offices and I like people and I like to see who I work with and hang out with them and laugh and enjoy each other’s company, and so I’m not jumping on the bandwagon of ‘let’s all be remote and work from home’.”
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StepZen, a new startup from the crew who gave you Apigee (which was sold to Google in 2016 for $625 million) had a different vision for their latest company. They are building a single API that pulls data from disparate sources to help developers deliver more complex customer experiences online.
Today, the startup emerged from stealth and announced an $8 million seed investment from Neotribe Ventures and Wing Venture Capital .
With years of experience working with APIs, the founders wanted to take that a step further, says CEO and co-founder Anant Jhingran. “StepZen is a product that lets front end developers easily create and consume one API for all the data they need from the back end,” he explained.
This is all in the service of providing a smoother, more consistent customer experience. That means whether you are on an e-commerce site accessing your order history or a banking app grabbing your current balance, these scenarios require pulling data from various back-end data resources. Connecting to those resources is a time-consuming task, and StepZen wants to simplify that for developers.
“Developers spend an enormous amount of time deploying and managing code that accesses the back end, and what StepZen wants to do is to give them that time back,” he said.
Instead of manually writing code to pull this data, StepZen enables developers to simply provide configuration information and credentials to connect to these back-end data sources, and then it builds a single API that handles all of the heavy lifting of pulling that data and presenting it when needed.
Jhingran uses the example of presenting a list of open orders for a customer. It sounds simple enough, but once you consider that the data could live in several places, including the CRM system, the order system or with your courier, that means accessing at least three separate and highly disparate systems. StepZen will help pull this all together via its API and present it smoothly to the user.
Today the company has 11 employees, including the three founders, with plans to add another eight or so in 2021. As they do that, CBO and co-founder Helen Whelan says they are working to build a diverse and inclusive company. While the founding team is itself diverse, they want to hire employees with diverse backgrounds and ways of thinking to build the most complete product and company.
“For the first 10 or so employees, we tapped into the networks of the people who we’ve worked with, people who you know can do a great job. Then I think it’s about deliberately expanding from there and deliberately taking the time that you need to explore and expand your pipeline of candidates,” she said.
The company is just nine months old and has been spending most of this year building the solution and working with pre-alpha users. Today the product is in alpha, with plans to release it as a software service early next year.
As the company emerges from stealth, it’s looking to continue building the product and looking for ways to remove as much complexity as possible. “We know how to do the hard things on the back end. We’ve got the database technologies and the API technologies down, and it’s now about finding how to make all of that simple on the outside and easy for developers to use, ” Whelan said.
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Most sales teams earn a commission after a sale closes, but nothing prior to that. Yet there are a variety of signals along the way that indicate the sales process is progressing, and SetSail, a startup from some former Google engineers, is using machine learning to figure out what those signals are, and how to compensate salespeople as they move along the path to a sale, not just after they close the deal.
Today, the startup announced a $7 million investment led by Wing Venture Capital with help from Operator Collective and Team8. Under the terms of the deal, Leyla Seka from Operator will be joining the board. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $11 million, according to the company.
CEO and co-founder Haggai Levi says his company is based on the idea that commission alone is not a good way to measure sales success, and that it is in fact a lagging indicator. “We came up with a different approach. We use machine learning to create progress-based incentives,” Levi explained.
To do that they rely on machine learning to discover the signals that are coming from the customer that indicate that the deal is moving forward, and using a points system, companies can begin compensating reps on hitting these milestones, even before the sale closes.
The seeds for the idea behind SetSail were planted years ago when the three founders were working at Google tinkering with ways to motivate sales reps beyond pure commission. From a behavioral perspective, Levi and his co-founders found that reps were taking fewer risks with a pure commission approach and they wanted to find a way to change that. The incremental compensation system achieves that.
“If I’m closing the deal, I’m getting my commission. If I’m not closing the deal, I’m getting nothing. That means from a behavioral point of view, I would take the shortest path to win a deal, and I would take the minimum risk possible. So if there’s a competitive situation I will try to avoid that,” he said.
They look at things like appointments, emails and call transcripts. The signals will vary by customer. One may find an appointment with CIO is a good signal a deal is on the right trajectory, but to avoid having reps gaming the system by filling the CRM with the kinds of positive signals the company is looking for, they only rely on objective data, rather than any kind of self-reporting information from reps themselves.
The team eventually built a system like this inside Google, and in 2018, left to build a solution for the rest of the world that does something similar.
As the company grows, Levi says he is building a diverse team, not only because it’s the right thing to do, but because it simply makes good business sense. “The reality is that we’re building a product for a diverse audience, and if we don’t have a diverse team we would never be able to build the right product,” he explained.
The company’s unique approach to sales compensation is resonating with customers like Dropbox, Lyft and Pendo, who are looking for new ways to motivate sales teams, especially during a pandemic when there may be a longer sales cycle. This kind of system provides a way to compensate sales teams more incrementally and reward positive approaches that have proven to result in sales.
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TechCrunch’s Connie Loizos published some interesting stats on seed and Series A financings this week, courtesy of data collected by Wing Venture Capital. In short, seed is the new Series A and Series A is the new Series B. Sure, we’ve been saying that for a while, but Wing has some clean data to back up those claims.
Years ago, a Series A round was roughly $5 million and a startup at that stage wasn’t expected to be generating revenue just yet, something typically expected upon raising a Series B. Now, those rounds have swelled to $15 million, according to deal data from the top 21 VC firms. And VCs are expecting the startups to be making money off their customers.
“Again, for the old gangsters of the industry, that’s a big shift from 2010, when just 15 percent of seed-stage companies that raised Series A rounds were already making some money,” Connie writes.
As for seed, in 2018, the average startup raised a total of $5.6 million prior to raising a Series A, up from $1.3 million in 2010.
Now on to IPO updates, then a closer look at all the companies raising big rounds. Want more TechCrunch newsletters? Sign up here. Contact me at kate.clark@techcrunch.com or @KateClarkTweets.
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Slack: The workplace communication software provider dropped its S-1 on Friday ahead of a direct listing. That’s when companies sell existing shares directly to the market, allowing them to skip the roadshow and minimize the astronomical fees typically associated with an initial public offering. Here’s the TLDR on financials: Slack reported revenues of $400.6 million in the fiscal year ending January 31, 2019, on losses of $138.9 million. That’s compared to a loss of $140.1 million on revenue of $220.5 million for the year before. Slack’s losses are shrinking (slowly), while its revenues expand (quickly). It’s not profitable yet, but is that surprising?
Zoom was the Slack we thought Slack was all along.
— alex (PVD) (@alex) April 26, 2019
Uber: The ride-hail giant is fast approaching its IPO, expected as soon as next week. On Friday, the company established an IPO price range of $44 to $50 per share to raise between $7.9 billion and $9 billion at a valuation of approximately $84 billion, significantly lower than the $100 billion previously reported estimations. The most likely outcome is Uber will price above range and all the latest estimates will be way off course. Best to sit back and see how Uber plays it. Oh, and PayPal said it would make a $500 million investment in the company in a private placement, as part of an extension of the partnership between the two.
There are a lot of fascinating companies raising colossal rounds, so I thought I’d dive a bit deeper than I normally do. Bear with me.
Carbon: The poster child for 3D printing has authorized the sale of $300 million in Series E shares, according to a Delaware stock filing uncovered by PitchBook. If Carbon raises the full amount, it could reach a valuation of $2.5 billion. Using its proprietary Digital Light Synthesis technology, the business has brought 3D-printing technology to manufacturing, building high-tech sports equipment, a line of custom sneakers for Adidas and more. It was valued at $1.7 billion by venture capitalists with a $200 million Series D in 2018.
Canoo: The electric vehicle startup formerly known as Evelozcity is on the hunt for $200 million in new capital. Backed by a clutch of private individuals and family offices from China, Germany and Taiwan, the company is hoping to line up the new capital from some more recognizable names as it finalizes supply deals with vendors, according to reporting from TechCrunch’s Jonathan Shieber. The company intends to make its vehicles available through a subscription-based model and currently has 400 employees. Canoo was founded in 2017 after Stefan Krause, a former executive at BMW and Deutsche Bank, and another former BMW executive, Ulrich Kranz, exited Faraday Future amid that company’s struggles.
Starry: The Boston-based wireless broadband internet startup has authorized the sale of Series D shares worth up to $125 million, according to a Delaware stock filing. If Starry closes the full authorized raise it will hold a post-money valuation of $870 million. A spokesperson for the company confirmed it had already raised new capital, but disputed the numbers. The company has already raised more than $160 million from investors, including FirstMark Capital and IAC. The company most recently closed a $100 million Series C this past July.
Selina & Sonder: The Airbnb competitor Sonder is in the process of closing a financing worth roughly $200 million at a $1 billion valuation, reports The Wall Street Journal. Investors including Greylock Partners, Spark Capital and Structure Capital are likely to participate. Sonder is four years old but didn’t emerge from stealth until 2018. The startup, which turns homes into hotels, quickly attracted more than $100 million in venture funding. Meanwhile, another hospitality business called Selina has raised $100 million at an $850 million valuation. The company, backed by Access Industries, Grupo Wiese and Colony Latam Partners, builds living/co-working/activity spaces across the world for digital nomads.

Fresh funds: Mary Meeker has made history with the close of her new fund, Bond Capital, the largest VC fund founded and led by a female investor to date. Bond has $1.25 billion in committed capital. If you remember, Meeker ditched Kleiner Perkins last fall and brought the firm’s entire growth team with her. Kleiner said it was a peaceful split that would allow the firm to focus more on its early-stage efforts, leaving the growth investing to Bond. Fortune, however, reported this week that a power struggle of sorts between Meeker and Mamoon Hamid, who joined recently to reenergize the early-stage side of things, was a larger cause of her exit.
Plus, SOSV, a multi-stage venture firm that was founded as the personal investment vehicle of entrepreneur Sean O’Sullivan after his company went public in 1994, has raised $218 million for its third fund. The vehicle has a $250 million target that SOSV expects to meet. Already, the fund is substantially larger than the firm’s previous vehicle, which closed with $150 million.
A grocery delivery startup crumbles: Honestbee, the online grocery delivery service in Asia, is nearly out of money and trying to offload its business. Despite looking impressive from the outside, the company is currently in crisis mode due to a cash crunch — there’s a lot happening right now. TechCrunch’s Jon Russell dives in deep here.
Extra Crunch: “When it comes to working with journalists, so many people are, frankly, idiots. I have seen reporters yank stories because founders are assholes, play unfairly, or have PR firms that use ridiculous pressure tactics when they have already committed to a story.” Sign up for Extra Crunch for a full list of PR don’ts. Here are some other EC pieces to hit the wire this week:
Equity: If you enjoy this newsletter, be sure to check out TechCrunch’s venture-focused podcast, Equity. In this week’s episode, available here, Crunchbase News editor-in-chief Alex Wilhelm and I chat about Kleiner Perkins, Chinese IPOs and Slack & Uber’s upcoming exits.
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Though the world of fashion is trying desperately to catch up to the digital age, retail is still fundamentally unchanged. Oak Labs is looking to shake things up with a smart mirror to be placed in the fitting room of clothing stores and boutiques.
The company just raised $4.1 million in seed funding led by Wing Venture Capital, and is piloting the software with Ralph Lauren in its Polo NYC… Read More
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Palerra, a cloud security startup, announced $17M in funding today as it continues to build its cloud security automation business. The round was led by new investors August Capital with current investors Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), Wing Venture Capital and Engineering Capital also participating. Today’s money brings the total investment to $25M. The cloud service was founded in… Read More
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