//

AtScale, the startup that helps companies move massive amounts of data into business intelligence and analytics tools, announced a $50 million Series D round today.

Morgan Stanley led the round with previous investors Storm Ventures and Atlantic Bridge joining in. New investor Wells Fargo also participated. The funding comes almost exactly a year after the company announced its $25 million Series C. Today’s funding brings the total amount raised to $120 million.

Bringing on an institutional investor like Morgan Stanley is often a signal that the company has reached the stage where it is at least beginning to think about the possibility of going public at some point in the future. AtScale CEO Chris Lynch acknowledged such a connection without making any broad commitment (as you would expect). “We are not close to being IPO-ready, but that was a future consideration in selecting Morgan Stanley,” Lynch told TechCrunch.

What the company does is help take big data and move it into tools where customers can make better use of it. AtScale co-founder Dave Mariani used to be at Yahoo where he helped pioneer the use of big data in the 2009/2010 timeframe. Unfortunately, systems at the time couldn’t deal with the volume of data and that is still a problem, one that AtScale says it is designed to solve. “We take a bunch of data silos and put a semantic layer across the data platforms and expose them in a consistent way,” Mariani told TechCrunch last year at the time of the Series C round. This allows company to get a big picture view of their data, rather than consuming it smaller chunks.

AtScale reported a banner year bringing on 50 new customers across their target verticals of retail, financial services, advertising and digital sales. These include Rakuten, Dell Technologies, TD Bank and Toyota. What’s more, the company stretched out this year, taking advantage of the last funding round to expand more into international markets in Europe and Asia, as the new client list illustrates.

The company was founded in 2013 and is based in San Mateo, California.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2QSVTIq

//

I’m heading back to Europe to hang out in Wroclaw and Warsaw, Poland. Are you ready?

I’ll be at a Wroclaw event, called In-Ference, which is happening on December 17 and you can submit to pitch here. The team will notify you if you have been chosen. The winner will receive a table at TC Disrupt in San Francisco.

The Warsaw event, here, is on the 19th at WeWork in Warsaw. You can sign up to pitch here. I’ll notify the folks I’ve chosen and the winner gets a table as well.

Special thanks to WeWork Labs in Warsaw for supplying some beer and pizza for the event and, as always, special thanks to Dermot Corr and Ahmad Piraiee for putting these things together. See you soon!

from Startups – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2SDjhHc

//

Juniper Square, a four-year-old startup at the intersection of enterprise software, real estate and financial technology, has brought in an additional $25 million in Series B funding to fuel the growth of its commercial real estate investment platform. Ribbit Capital led the round, with participation from Felicis Ventures.

Founded in 2014 by Alex Robinson, Yonas Fisseha and Adam Ginsburg, the startup’s chief executive officer, vice president of engineering and VP of product, respectively, Juniper has raised a total of $33 million to date.

The company operates a software platform for commercial real estate investment firms — an industry that has been slower to adopt the latest and greatest technology. Robinson tells TechCrunch those firms raise money from pension funds, endowments and elsewhere to purchase and then manage commercial real estate, using Juniper’s software as a tool throughout that process. Juniper supports fundraising and capital management with a suite of customer relationship management (CRM) and productivity tools for its users.

The San Francisco-based company says it currently has hundreds of customers and manages half a trillion dollars in real estate.

“The private markets are just as big as the public markets … but the private markets have typically not been accessible to everyday investors, and that’s part of what we are trying to do with Juniper Square,” Robinson told TechCrunch. “It’s a tremendously large market that almost nobody knows anything about.”

Juniper will use its latest investment to double headcount from 60 to 120 in the year ahead, with plans to beef up its engineering, product and sales teams specifically as the company expects to continue experiencing massive growth. Robinson said it’s grown between 3x and 4x every year for the last three years.

Felicis Ventures managing director Sundeep Peechu said in a statement that Juniper “is one of the fastest growing real estate tech companies” the firm has ever seen: “They are building technology for an industry that touches nearly every human and every corner of the economy. It’s a hard problem that takes time to solve, but the benefits of making these huge markets work better are tremendous.”

Existing in a relatively niche intersection, Juniper’s job now is to prove itself more efficient and user-friendly than Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, which, Robinson says, are still its biggest competitor.

“Our goal is to be the de facto platform for real estate investment and we are well on our way to becoming that.”

from Startups – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2Gfwrc4

//

India has 22 official languages, which often presents a challenge for businesses that want to scale across the entire country. Video-sharing app Roposo, however, uses that to its advantage by offering content in several different regional languages. Based in Gurgaon, Roposo announced today that it has raised a $10 million Series C from returning investors Tiger Global and Bertelsmann, bring its total funding so far to $31 million. Roposo will use new funding for hiring, product development, and user acquisition.

Tiger Global first invested in Roposo’s Series A round and also returned for its Series B, according to Crunchbase. After an Indian startup funding spree, Tiger Global hit pause on new investments there for a couple of years before reportedly closing a $3.75 billion fund this year to focus on India, the U.S., and China. Roposo’s funding news comes a week after facility management company Facilio, another Indian startup, announced that it also received funding from Tiger Global.

Roposo originally launched as a fashion-based social network in 2013 before pivoting to videos in August 2017. It now claims 7.5 million monthly active users, 250,000 user-generated videos, and 160 million video views a day.

Co-founder and chief executive officer Mayank Bhangadia tells TechCrunch that Roposo’s pivot came from “a gradual evolution of the platform from a fashion social network into rebooting as a complete social video network to enter the next big level of game play.” Users still share videos about fashion, but now it is one of several topics, including music, comedy, spirituality, tech, travel, and current events (Roposo organizes videos into about 25 interest-based channels).

Roposo currently claims a total user base of 25 million. One obvious question is how the app plans to keep their attention as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram each aggressively promote their live-streaming video features.

One of Roposo’s key advantages is its focus on multiple Indian languages (it offers content in 10 so far), which gives it an edge in smaller Indian cities and towns. Bhangadia says it also differentiates by creating a TV-like viewing experience and offering editing tools that make it easy for people to start broadcasting (about 30% of Roposo’s users have created content). Video creators can also make money based on how much user engagement their content generates.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2GcJw68