As Enterprise Cloud Services Heat Up, Fruition Partners Alights On $12M To Tackle IT Specifically
Fruition Partners, a Chicago-based startup that helps enterprises get their under-the-hood, IT operations into the cloud, has picked up $12 million in funding from Trident Capital, the VC that has backed a range of tech companies ranging from consumer plays like Kayak to more enterprise-focused startups like Qualys. The round is being termed a Series A, but Fruition’s CEO Marc Talluto tells me that it is in fact the first money it has raised, and that it has been bootstrapped since being founded in 2003. That’s impressive, considering that some of Fruition’s existing clients include Coca-Cola, General Electric (GE), Delphi, Fox, Target, Tiffany & Company, Viacom and Yale University. The funds, Talluto says, will be used to further build out the business, and to possibly look ahead to some consolidation in the space with an acquisition. Fruition Partners’ funding comes at an interesting juncture in enterprise IT. The growth of enterprise cloud services has had a number of boosts ...
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Swipely Raises $12M To Plug Marketing Tools Into Retail Payment Systems
"Payment marketing" startup Swipely is announcing that it has raised $12 million in Series B funding. Although founder and CEO Angus Davis (who founded TellMe, which was acquired by Microsoft) said that he's focused on "looking forward to the future," it's worth noting that this is the first round that Swipely has raised since the company moved on from allowing users to share credit card purchases with friends to its current focus on payments, marketing, and loyalty. He did say that the company was able to sustain itself for three years on its $7.5 million Series A because it spent the money "judiciously," and because it was bringing in significant revenue.
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G2 Crowd Takes On Gartner Magic Quadrant With Crowdsourced Review Platform
G2 Crowd wants to disrupt Gartner’s Magic Quadrant through a real-time, crowdsourced platform of peer reviews and social analytics targeting the CRM and marketing automation markets. The new “Grids” service launches June 1. The platform, free to explore, analyzes and correlates about 15,000 peer reviews that it has aggregated since its launch in February. CEO Abel Goddard says G2 Crowd will sell access to its crowdsourced data and provide comparison tools that customers can use. The value is in the data and how it is segmented. Customers now pay a one-time fee of $199 to get the CRM data. Abel envisions it becoming a subscription model. Grids feeds peer reviews, web traffic, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media data into an algorithm to determine how companies are perceived. The peer reviews are weighted more heavily than other data. Reviews so far put Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics in the lead for the CRM market. Leading marketing automation companies include Marketo, ...
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YouEye Raises $3M For Its Webcam-Based Usability Testing Service With Emotion Recognition
YouEye, a usability testing service that uses a pool of screened candidates to help designers and developer get feedback for their sites, today announced that it has raised a $3 million funding round led by investors Bobby Yazdani, the founder and CEO of Saba Software and an investor in Dropbox, Google, Qwiki, Brian McClendon, the co-founder of Keyhole, Inc (which later became Google Earth) and Beth McClendon. A number of additional investors also participated in this round, which also includes a $400.000 raise from early 2011 led by Bobby Yazdani. The company, which describes itself as a “UX lab in the cloud,” takes a different approach from other online usability test service. The focus for YouEye goes beyond asking users questions about a site and tracking their cursors. Instead, the service records the participants interactions with a site and tries to capture their emotions. The service is also currently alpha testing eye-tracking as another data point for its studies. YouEye’s ...
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Productivity App Wunderlist Is Launching A Paid, Pro Version Aimed At Business Users
As the world of productivity and calendaring apps continues to get more crowded, one of the bigger players from Europe stepping up its game: Wunderlist, the to-do app with 9 million downloads to date, is planning to launch a Pro version of its currently free service. Initially aimed at helping with collaboration and task management for small businesses, Wunderlist Pro will be the first paid product from Berlin-based 6Wunderkinder, which has found a loyal following on around its concept of making an easy-to-use, super simple app -- or, in the words of founder and CEO Christian Reber, your "best buddy," not a piece of technology.
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