workday ventures
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Workday to acquire online procurement platform Scout RFP for $540M
Workday announced this afternoon that it has entered into an agreement to acquire online procurement platform Scout RFP for $540 million. The company raised more than $60 million on a post valuation of $184.5 million, according to PitchBook data.
The acquisition builds on top of Workday’s existing procurement solutions, Workday Procurement and Workday Inventory, but Workday chief product product officer Petros Dermetzis wrote in a blog post announcing the deal that Scout gives the company a more complete solution for customers.
“With increased importance around the supplier as a strategic asset, the acquisition of Scout RFP will help accelerate Workday’s ability to deliver a comprehensive source-to-pay solution with a best-in-class strategic sourcing offering, elevating the office of procurement in strategic importance and transforming the procurement function,” he wrote.
Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research says that Workday has been trying to be the end-to-end cloud back office player. In spite of their own offerings in this area, he says, “One of their big gaps has been in procurement.”
Wang says that Workday has been investing with eye toward filling gaps in the product set for some time. In fact, Workday Ventures has been an investor in Scout RFP since 2018, and it’s also an official Workday partner.
“A lot of the Workday investments are in portfolio companies that are complimentary to Workday’s larger vision of the future of Cloud ERP. Today’s definition of ERP includes finance, HCM (human capital management), projects, procurement, supply chai and asset management, Wang told TechCrunch
As the Scout RFP founders stated in a blog post about today’s announcement, the two companies have worked well together and a deal made sense. “Working closely with the Workday team, we realized how similar our companies’ beliefs and values are. Both companies put user experience at the center of product focus and are committed to customer satisfaction, employee engagement and overall business impact. It was not surprising how easy it was to work together and how quickly we saw success partnering on go-to-market activities. From a culture standpoint, it just worked,” they wrote. A deal eventually came together as a result.
Scout RFP is a fairly substantial business, with 240 customers in 155 countries. There are 300,000 users on the platform, according to data supplied by the company. The company’s 160 employees will be moving to Workday when the deal closes, which is expected by the end of January, pending standard regulatory review.
Powered by WPeMatico
Workato raises $25M for its integration platform
Workato, a startup that offers an integration and automation platform for businesses that competes with the likes of MuleSoft, SnapLogic and Microsoft’s Logic Apps, today announced that it has raised a $25 million Series B funding round from Battery Ventures, Storm Ventures, ServiceNow and Workday Ventures. Combined with its previous rounds, the company has now received investments from some of the largest SaaS players, including Salesforce, which participated in an earlier round.
At its core, Workato’s service isn’t that different from other integration services (you can think of them as IFTTT for the enterprise), in that it helps you to connect disparate systems and services, set up triggers to kick off certain actions (if somebody signs a contract on DocuSign, send a message to Slack and create an invoice). Like its competitors, it connects to virtually any SaaS tool that a company would use, no matter whether that’s Marketo and Salesforce, or Slack and Twitter. And like some of its competitors, all of this can be done with a drag-and-drop interface.
What’s different, Workato founder and CEO Vijay Tella tells me, is that the service was built for business users, not IT admins. “Other enterprise integration platforms require people who are technical to build and manage them,” he said. “With the explosion in SaaS with lines of business buying them — the IT team gets backlogged with the various integration needs. Further, they are not able to handle all the workflow automation needs that businesses require to streamline and innovate on the operations.”
Battery Ventures’ general partner Neeraj Agrawal also echoed this. “As we’ve all seen, the number of SaaS applications run by companies is growing at a very rapid clip,” he said. “This has created a huge need to engage team members with less technical skill-sets in integrating all these applications. These types of users are closer to the actual business workflows that are ripe for automation, and we found Workato’s ability to empower everyday business users super compelling.”
Tella also stressed that Workato makes extensive use of AI/ML to make building integrations and automations easier. The company calls this Recipe Q. “Leveraging the tens of billions of events processed, hundreds of millions of metadata elements inspected and hundreds of thousands of automations that people have built on our platform — we leverage ML to guide users to build the most effective integration/automation by recommending next steps as they build these automations,” he explained. “It recommends the next set of actions to take, fields to map, auto-validates mappings, etc. The great thing with this is that as people build more automations — it learns from them and continues to make the automation smarter.”
The AI/ML system also handles errors and offers features like sentiment analysis to analyze emails and detect their intent, with the ability to route them depending on the results of that analysis.
As part of today’s announcement, the company is also launching a new AI-enabled feature: Automation Editions for sales, marketing and HR (with editions for finance and support coming in the future). The idea here is to give those departments a kit with pre-built workflows that helps them to get started with the service without having to bring in IT.
Powered by WPeMatico
Data.world raises $12M to help Fortune 500 companies close the great data divide
Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, Warby Parker and a long list of other startups of the 21st century have appointed C-level employees to roles focused exclusively on data science.
These digital-age companies have established “data cultures,” which provide employees broad access to high-quality data, advocate for data literacy and have data-driven decision-making processes, according to Carl Anderson, who previously led data analytics and data science at Warby Parker and WeWork.
Fortune 500 companies are still a long way from this ideal. Data.world, a sort of social networking site for data projects and teams, wants to give them the tools to get there. Its collaborative data community gives employees at large businesses a place to upload, exchange and catalog data sets, then discuss their findings with other employees.
“There is a huge data divide that has occurred between these big traditional companies that were built from the ground up from atoms and these digital-age companies that were built from the ground up from bits,” data.world chief executive officer Brett Hurt told TechCrunch.
Today, Austin-based data.world is announcing a $12 million investment led by Workday Ventures, with participation from The Associated Press (AP) and OurCrowd. The round brings the company’s total raised since its 2016 launch to $45.3 million, including an $18.7 million Series B in February 2017.
Data.world will use the capital to continue building out its enterprise offering, which it rolled out recently. The enterprise product, which counts AP as a customer, connects with Tableau, Microsoft Excel and Power BI, IBM SPSS, MicroStrategy, Google Data Studio and more.
Hurt, who previously founded the now-public customer reviews and social commerce platform BazaarVoice, says GitHub was a big inspiration for data.world.
“They’ve done an incredible job of democratizing access to code,” he said. “They made every programmer in the world better by giving them access to the world’s code, and data is one of those things that’s very liberating if you have access to [it].”
The data.world platform is also widely used by journalists, hence the investment from the AP. Using data.world, journalists can access complex data sets quickly and efficiently. Hurt says it’s “changed the game for data journalism.”
“AP was born back in 1846 as a cooperative of newspaper publishers sharing access to a fast horse to get news updates from the war in Mexico,” said Jim Kennedy, AP’s senior vice president for strategy and enterprise development in a statement. “The data.world platform is like that fast horse, enabling us to open important new territory for newsgathering in the 21st century.”
Other backers of data.world include Chicago Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Fyrfly Venture Partners, Hunt Technology Ventures LP, LiveOak Venture Partners and Sherpa Asset Management AG.
Powered by WPeMatico