#USA YayPay raises $8.4 million for its accounts receivable service

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Fintech startup YayPay just raised another $8.4 million for its software-as-a-service solution focused on collecting money from outstanding invoices. The company participated in TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield.

Information Venture Partners led today’s funding round with existing investors Birchmere, QED, Fifth Third Capital, Gaingels and 500 Fintech Fund also participating.

YayPay targets large companies with an accounting department. The startup provides the perfect service to handle unpaid invoices. YayPay analyzes previous invoices and predicts when you’re supposed to get paid depending on the client and the nature of the invoice. This way, you know which account needs your attention right now.

Teams can collaborate to send reminders and make sure everyone is on the same page. You can also view information about your client directly in YayPay thanks to CRM and ERP integrations.

YayPay also eliminates a bunch of pesky tasks, such as gentle email reminders. You can create automated workflows so that your clients get an email a few days before a payment deadline. If they don’t open the email, you can receive a notification telling you to call them. Customers can also pay invoices directly using YayPay. The platform supports ACH and credit cards.

While this seems like a niche product, the company has managed to attract 480 clients who have generated over $7 billion in accounts receivables. This represents a 500 percent user base increase over the last 12 months.


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#USA Accenture will acquire digital ad company Adaptly

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Accenture announced today that it’s reached an agreement to acquire Adaptly.

The digital advertising company launched in 2010 with self-serve tools for running ads across different social networks. In a blog post about the acquisition, co-founder and CEO Nikhil Sethi wrote that the company’s mission hasn’t changed, but it has expanded to support Google and Amazon’s ad platforms, while also introducing “several creative technology solutions that make our media buying work harder.”

While Adaptly has mostly stayed out of the headlines for the past few years, the company now has nearly 150 employees and works with advertisers like Chico’s, Mazda, Prudential and Sprint. Once the deal closes, it will become part of the Accenture’s digital marketing arm, Accenture Interactive Operations.

“As new consumer experiences emerge and new digital platforms are born, our mission has always been to help brands connect with people in new and powerful ways,” Sethi said in the acquisition release, adding, “Being a part of Accenture is really exciting as, together, we’ll have an amazing opportunity to supercharge our key platform partnerships, drive more transparency and effectiveness for our clients, and enable them to deliver more relevant, high impact experiences.”

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. It looks like Adaptly hasn’t raised outside funding (or at least hasn’t announced any funding) from investors since 2012. Those investors include Valhalla Partners, Time Warner Investments, First Round Capital, Charles River Ventures and Lerer Hippeau.

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#USA Accenture will acquire digital ad company Adaptly

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Accenture announced today that it’s reached an agreement to acquire Adaptly.

The digital advertising company launched in 2010 with self-serve tools for running ads across different social networks. In a blog post about the acquisition, co-founder and CEO Nikhil Sethi wrote that the company’s mission hasn’t changed, but it has expanded to support Google and Amazon’s ad platforms, while also introducing “several creative technology solutions that make our media buying work harder.”

While Adaptly has mostly stayed out of the headlines for the past few years, the company now has nearly 150 employees and works with advertisers like Chico’s, Mazda, Prudential and Sprint. Once the deal closes, it will become part of the Accenture’s digital marketing arm, Accenture Interactive Operations.

“As new consumer experiences emerge and new digital platforms are born, our mission has always been to help brands connect with people in new and powerful ways,” Sethi said in the acquisition release, adding, “Being a part of Accenture is really exciting as, together, we’ll have an amazing opportunity to supercharge our key platform partnerships, drive more transparency and effectiveness for our clients, and enable them to deliver more relevant, high impact experiences.”

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. It looks like Adaptly hasn’t raised outside funding (or at least hasn’t announced any funding) from investors since 2012. Those investors include Valhalla Partners, Time Warner Investments, First Round Capital, Charles River Ventures and Lerer Hippeau.

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#USA Accenture will acquire digital ad company Adaptly

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Accenture announced today that it’s reached an agreement to acquire Adaptly.

The digital advertising company launched in 2010 with self-serve tools for running ads across different social networks. In a blog post about the acquisition, co-founder and CEO Nikhil Sethi wrote that the company’s mission hasn’t changed, but it has expanded to support Google and Amazon’s ad platforms, while also introducing “several creative technology solutions that make our media buying work harder.”

While Adaptly has mostly stayed out of the headlines for the past few years, the company now has nearly 150 employees and works with advertisers like Chico’s, Mazda, Prudential and Sprint. Once the deal closes, it will become part of the Accenture’s digital marketing arm, Accenture Interactive Operations.

“As new consumer experiences emerge and new digital platforms are born, our mission has always been to help brands connect with people in new and powerful ways,” Sethi said in the acquisition release, adding, “Being a part of Accenture is really exciting as, together, we’ll have an amazing opportunity to supercharge our key platform partnerships, drive more transparency and effectiveness for our clients, and enable them to deliver more relevant, high impact experiences.”

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. It looks like Adaptly hasn’t raised outside funding (or at least hasn’t announced any funding) from investors since 2012. Those investors include Valhalla Partners, Time Warner Investments, First Round Capital, Charles River Ventures and Lerer Hippeau.

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#USA Accenture will acquire digital ad company Adaptly

//

Accenture announced today that it’s reached an agreement to acquire Adaptly.

The digital advertising company launched in 2010 with self-serve tools for running ads across different social networks. In a blog post about the acquisition, co-founder and CEO Nikhil Sethi wrote that the company’s mission hasn’t changed, but it has expanded to support Google and Amazon’s ad platforms, while also introducing “several creative technology solutions that make our media buying work harder.”

While Adaptly has mostly stayed out of the headlines for the past few years, the company now has nearly 150 employees and works with advertisers like Chico’s, Mazda, Prudential and Sprint. Once the deal closes, it will become part of the Accenture’s digital marketing arm, Accenture Interactive Operations.

“As new consumer experiences emerge and new digital platforms are born, our mission has always been to help brands connect with people in new and powerful ways,” Sethi said in the acquisition release, adding, “Being a part of Accenture is really exciting as, together, we’ll have an amazing opportunity to supercharge our key platform partnerships, drive more transparency and effectiveness for our clients, and enable them to deliver more relevant, high impact experiences.”

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. It looks like Adaptly hasn’t raised outside funding (or at least hasn’t announced any funding) from investors since 2012. Those investors include Valhalla Partners, Time Warner Investments, First Round Capital, Charles River Ventures and Lerer Hippeau.

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#USA Accenture will acquire digital ad company Adaptly

//

Accenture announced today that it’s reached an agreement to acquire Adaptly.

The digital advertising company launched in 2010 with self-serve tools for running ads across different social networks. In a blog post about the acquisition, co-founder and CEO Nikhil Sethi wrote that the company’s mission hasn’t changed, but it has expanded to support Google and Amazon’s ad platforms, while also introducing “several creative technology solutions that make our media buying work harder.”

While Adaptly has mostly stayed out of the headlines for the past few years, the company now has nearly 150 employees and works with advertisers like Chico’s, Mazda, Prudential and Sprint. Once the deal closes, it will become part of the Accenture’s digital marketing arm, Accenture Interactive Operations.

“As new consumer experiences emerge and new digital platforms are born, our mission has always been to help brands connect with people in new and powerful ways,” Sethi said in the acquisition release, adding, “Being a part of Accenture is really exciting as, together, we’ll have an amazing opportunity to supercharge our key platform partnerships, drive more transparency and effectiveness for our clients, and enable them to deliver more relevant, high impact experiences.”

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. It looks like Adaptly hasn’t raised outside funding (or at least hasn’t announced any funding) from investors since 2012. Those investors include Valhalla Partners, Time Warner Investments, First Round Capital, Charles River Ventures and Lerer Hippeau.

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#USA Tigera raises $30M Series B for its Kubernetes security and compliance platform

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Tigera, a startup that offers security and compliance solutions for Kubernetes container deployments, today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B round led by Insight Partners. Existing investors Madrona, NEA and Wing also participated in this round.

Like everybody in the Kubernetes ecosystem, Tigera is exhibiting at KubeCon this week, so I caught up with the team to talk about the state of the company and its plans for this new raise.

“We are in a very exciting position,” Tigera president and CEO Ratan Tipirneni told me. “All the four public cloud players [AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and IBM Cloud] have adopted us for their public Kubernetes service. The large Kubernetes distros like Red Hat and Docker are using us.” In addition, the team has signed up other enterprises, often in the healthcare and financial industry, and SaaS players (all of which it isn’t allowed to name) that use its service directly.

The company says that it didn’t need to raise right now. “We didn’t need the money right now, but we had a lot of incoming interest,” Tipirneni said. The company will use the funding to expand its engineering, marketing and customer success teams. In total, it plans to quadruple its sales force. In addition, it plans to set up a large office in Vancouver, Canada, mostly because of the availability of talent there.

In the legacy IT world, security and compliance solutions could rely on the knowledge that the underlying infrastructure was relatively stable. Now, though, with the advent of containers and DevOps, workloads are highly dynamic, but that also makes the challenge of securing them and ensuring compliance with regulations like HIPAA or standards like PCI more complex, too. The promise of Tigera’s solution is that it allows enterprises to ensure compliance by using a zero-trust model that authorizes each service on the network, encrypts all the traffic and enforces the policies the admins have set for their company and needs. All of this data is logged in detail and, if necessary, enterprises can pull it for incident management or forensic analysis. 

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#USA Future Family secures a $100M credit line to help more families with fertility care

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West Owens, CFO and Claire Tomkins, CEO

West Owens, Future Family CFO, and Claire Tomkins, CEO

Future Family is a startup (and a Disrupt Startup Battlefield alum!) that helps families more easily afford fertility services like IVF and egg freezing. They work with fertility clinics to get the often unpredictable costs set in stone, then cover said costs and convert them into a more approachable monthly payment plan.

But covering those costs up front isn’t cheap, which lead to long waitlists for those looking to Future Family for help. With that in mind, the company has locked in a $100 million credit line to help them power through their waitlist and immediately offer their services to more people.

The capital is coming from Atalaya, a capital management firm that specializes in funding specialty finance companies like Future Family (or Point, a startup that provides capital to home buyers in exchange for equity in the home, in which Atalaya invested $150 million earlier this year.)

So what does this mean? Most immediately, it means that Future Family will be able to clear up its waitlists before moving on to offering same-day approval/financing to new customers.

Claire Tomkins founded Future Family after seeing for herself just how complicated and expensive the fertility care process could be. After spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on the fertility care involved with having her first child, she set out to make it less complicated and more accessible.

This news comes a little less than two months after Future Family raised $10 million in a Series A round. A few weeks before that, the company adjusted its model to work more like a monthly subscription than a loan, allowing additional costs (like genetic testing and travel) to be wrapped in should the need arise.

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#USA AI-powered knowledge sharing platform Guru raises $25 million Series B

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Guru, the enterprise-focused information sharing platform, has today announced the close of a $25 million Series B funding led by Thrive Capital, with participation from existing investors Emergence Capital, FirstMark Capital, Slack Fund, and Michael Dell’s MSD Capital.

Guru came on to the scene in 2013 with the premise that organizations are not so great at building out informational databases, nor are they very good at using them. So Guru built a Chrome extension that simply sits as a layer on employees’ computers and surfaces the right information whenever asked.

Specifically, this comes in handy for customer service agents and sales people who need to answer questions from people outside of the organization quickly and accurately.

This summer, Guru revamped the platform to incorporate a new feature set called AI Suggest. The feature simply auto-surfaces relevant information as the employee goes about their business, with no searches or inquiries necessary. The company also unveiled two different versions of the feature, text and voice, so that it is still useful when employees are on the phone.

Companies that are sensitive about their information being shared with Guru can customize the level of access given to Guru, including or excluding certain third-party integrations etc., as well as how long information is stored on Guru. No personally identifying information about end-customers is ever stored on the Guru platform.

Over the past couple years, Guru has brought on big-name clients including BuzzFeed, Glossier, Intercom and Thumbtack.

Guru has signed on 200 new clients since the launch of AI Suggest in July, with a total of around 800 companies on the platform, representing thousands of users.

For now, the company is hyper focused on growth.

“We are not profitable yet,” said cofounder and CEO Rick Nucci .” But we’re intentionally focused on growth. What prompted us to raise this round right now is to continue to execute on the momentum of the business.”

Guru has now raised a total of $27.5 million.

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#USA AI-powered knowledge sharing platform Guru raises $25 million Series B

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Guru, the enterprise-focused information sharing platform, has today announced the close of a $25 million Series B funding led by Thrive Capital, with participation from existing investors Emergence Capital, FirstMark Capital, Slack Fund, and Michael Dell’s MSD Capital.

Guru came on to the scene in 2013 with the premise that organizations are not so great at building out informational databases, nor are they very good at using them. So Guru built a Chrome extension that simply sits as a layer on employees’ computers and surfaces the right information whenever asked.

Specifically, this comes in handy for customer service agents and sales people who need to answer questions from people outside of the organization quickly and accurately.

This summer, Guru revamped the platform to incorporate a new feature set called AI Suggest. The feature simply auto-surfaces relevant information as the employee goes about their business, with no searches or inquiries necessary. The company also unveiled two different versions of the feature, text and voice, so that it is still useful when employees are on the phone.

Companies that are sensitive about their information being shared with Guru can customize the level of access given to Guru, including or excluding certain third-party integrations etc., as well as how long information is stored on Guru. No personally identifying information about end-customers is ever stored on the Guru platform.

Over the past couple years, Guru has brought on big-name clients including BuzzFeed, Glossier, Intercom and Thumbtack.

Guru has signed on 200 new clients since the launch of AI Suggest in July, with a total of around 800 companies on the platform, representing thousands of users.

For now, the company is hyper focused on growth.

“We are not profitable yet,” said cofounder and CEO Rick Nucci .” But we’re intentionally focused on growth. What prompted us to raise this round right now is to continue to execute on the momentum of the business.”

Guru has now raised a total of $27.5 million.

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