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News: E-commerce-as-a-service platform Cart.com picks up $98M to give brands scaling tools

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The company provides software, services and infrastructure to small businesses so they can scale online.

Cart.com, a Houston-based company providing end-to-end e-commerce services, brought in its third funding round this year, this time a $98 million Series B round to bring its total funding to $143 million.

Oak HC/FT led the new round of funding and was joined by PayPal Ventures, Clearco, G9 Ventures, Mercury Fund, Valedor Partners and Arsenal Growth. Strategic investors in the Series B include HeyDay CEO Sebastian Rymarz and Casper CEO Philip Krim. This new round follows a $25 million Series A round, led by Mercury and Arsenal in July, and a $20 million seed round from Bearing Ventures.

Cart.com CEO Omair Tariq, who was previously an executive at Home Depot and COO of Blinds.com, co-founded the company in September 2020 with Jim Jacobson, former CEO of RTIC Outdoors.

Tariq told TechCrunch that the company provides software, services and infrastructure to small businesses so they can scale online. Cart.com is taking the best parts of selling direct-to-consumer on marketplaces like Amazon and Shopify to create value for brands. Tariq said he is pioneering the term “e-commerce-as-a-service” to bring together under one platform a suite of business tools like store software, marketing, fulfillment, payments and customer service.

“We see the power of having an interconnected platform,” Tariq said. “There also needs to be a hybrid between selling direct-to-consumer on Amazon and Shopify for companies that don’t have the money to pay for a percentage of their sales and receive no access to customers or data, and needing 20 different plug-ins that are not connected.”

Cart.com went after the new funding after seeing validation of its idea: brands coming to them wanting more products and services, which led to acquisitions. The company has acquired seven companies so far, including — AmeriCommerce, SpaceCraft Brands and, more recently, Dumont Project and Sauceda Industries. Tariq is planning for another three or four by the end of the year.

In addition, it received inbound interest from strategic investors, like Oak and PayPal, which Tariq said was going to enable the company “to be more successful faster.”

Allen Miller, principal at Oak HC/FT, said after spending time with Tariq to understand his vision about Cart.com’s software, payments and services, he felt that the company was doing something that didn’t exist in today’s commerce infrastructure.

He said that Cart.com is well positioned to help companies, like those with $1 million in sales, stay focused on growing the business while Cart.com stitches together all of the tools for them to operate in the background.

“It’s a unique offering to merchants that has a high value proposition,” Miller said. “The vision and drive that Omair and Jim have, along with an inspiring mission they want to achieve — to be brand-centric and help the next generation of merchants. These guys also have a good playbook on finding companies and teams to acquire, as well as handling the post M&A to have everyone on one platform.”

The new financing will enable Cart.com to further invest in technology development and to increase headcount by at least 15 times, with plans to go from fewer than two dozen employees to more than 300 team members by the end of the year. The company has nearly 70 jobs posted on its website for positions in engineering, technology, digital marketing and e-commerce. Tariq also expects half of the funds to go toward more acquisitions.

Cart.com currently serves over 2,000 e-commerce brands, including GNC, Haymaker Coffee, KeHE and Gravatiq, and processes more than $700 million in gross merchandise value per year. The company saw revenue increase 400% since the platform’s launch in November.

In addition, the company has nine fulfillment centers across the country, and is increasing its access to reach 80% of the U.S. population with two-day shipping, Tariq added.

“We are giving the power back to brands by giving them what they need to operate e-commerce,” he said. “There are still a few pieces to fill in so brands have a unified experience, but with us, they can add fulfilment, marketing or customer conversion tools with the click of a couple of buttons.”

News: Bite Ninja scoops up pre-seed funding to reimagine restaurant working environments

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The company’s remote hiring technology enable restaurants to fill last-minute drive-thru or cashier shifts.

Will Clem knows all too well about restaurant workers not showing up for a shift. At least one person would have car trouble or need to stay home with sick children, and it became a common occurrence on the weekends for the co-founder of Memphis Meats and owner of Baby Jacks BBQ in Memphis.

Needing to fill a shift one Friday night, Clem decided to prop his laptop in the drive-thru lane of one of his restaurants and took orders from home by remoting into the system. No one noticed that he wasn’t actually taking orders from the kitchen itself. Thus came the idea for Bite Ninja, a remote hiring technology platform for restaurants.

Clem connected with Orin Wilson to start the company in 2020 and worked for a year on the technology before launching it in March. Today, the company announced $675,000 in pre-seed funding led by Y Combinator, AgFunder and Manta Ray.

With many restaurants unable to find workers as a result of the global pandemic, Clem and Wilson wanted to build a technology that would enable restaurants to go back to normal operating hours, or even reopen their stores. At the same time, the workers, or “Ninjas” as they are referred to, can work the drive-thru or counter for a lunch or dinner rush shift from home, but appear on-screen to customers via menu boards, Wilson said.

Bite Ninja drive-thru. Image Credits: Bite Ninja

“When a restaurant is slammed, you need an army of people to work the rush, but it is not reasonable to ask them to get in their uniform and get in their cars, last-minute, to clock in for just an hour or two,” he added. “They have control of their schedule and can pick the right shift for them. It is so popular that we typically have five to 10 people bidding on each shift.”

Bite Ninja is providing a better experience and reaches potential workers that would not necessarily have an interest in performing fast food work. Many of the 3,000 Ninjas already working with the company are stay-at-home moms and retirees with customer service experience, but who can’t physically come into a store, Clem said. In addition, the company is working with the Nurse-Family Partnership to help women get back into the workforce.

The company initially ran three pilot programs and has expanded services to curbside and front cashier stations. The funding will enable Bite Ninja to scale initiatives, hire additional software engineers and prepare for a rollout at national food chains.

Since launching earlier this year, Bite Ninja is already being used in a few thousand stores.

Manuel Gonzalez, partner at AgFunder, said restaurants are a big part of entrepreneurship, but the pandemic forced more than 110,000 of them out of business.

“Bite Ninja’s solution is one that decreases costs to restaurant owners, but increases the income of the worker,” he said. “It also helps entrepreneurs and the community because restaurants are important for economic, cultural, community and social points of view.”

News: Facebook engineers develop new open source time keeping appliance

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Most people probably don’t realize just how much our devices are time driven, whether it’s your phone, your laptop or a network server. For the most part, time keeping has been an esoteric chore, taken care of by a limited number of hardware manufacturers. While these devices served their purpose, a couple of Facebook engineers

Most people probably don’t realize just how much our devices are time driven, whether it’s your phone, your laptop or a network server. For the most part, time keeping has been an esoteric chore, taken care of by a limited number of hardware manufacturers. While these devices served their purpose, a couple of Facebook engineers decided there had to be a better way. So they built a new more accurate time keeping device that fits on a PCI Express (PCIe) card, and contributed it to the Open Compute Project as an open source project.

At a basic level, says Olag Obleukhov, a production engineer at Facebook, it’s simply pinging this time-keeping server to make sure each device is reporting the same time. “Almost every single electronic device today uses NTP — Network Time Synchronization Protocol — which you have on your phone, on your watch, on your laptop, everywhere, and they all connect to these NTP servers where they just go and say, ‘what time is it’ and the NTP server provides the time,” he explained.

Before Facebook developed a new way of doing this, there were basically two ways to check the time. If you were a developer, you probably used something like Facebook.com as a time checking mechanism, but a company like Facebook, working at massive scale, needed something that worked even when there wasn’t an internet connection. Companies running data centers have a hardware device called Stratum One, which is a big box that sits in the data center, and has no other job than acting as the time keeper.

Because these time-keeping boxes were built by a handful of companies over years, they were solid and worked, but it was hard to get new features. What’s more, companies like Facebook couldn’t control the boxes because of their proprietary nature. Obleukhov and his colleague research scientist, Ahmad Byagowi began to attack the problem by looking for a way to create these devices by building a PCIe card with off-the-shelf parts that you could stick into any PC with an open slot.

Image Credits: Facebook

They literally drew the first design on an iPad and began to build that vision into a prototype. A time appliance relies on a couple of key components: a GNSS receiver and what’s called a high stability oscillator. In a blog post describing the project, Obleukhov and Byagowi explained the role of these two parts:

“It all starts from a GNSS receiver that provides the time of day (ToD) as well as the 1 pulse per second (PPS). When the receiver is backed by a high-stability oscillator (e.g., an atomic clock or an oven-controlled crystal oscillator), it can provide time that is nanosecond-accurate. The time is delivered across the network via an off-the-shelf network card,” the two engineers wrote.

It all sounds pretty basic when described like this, but it’s actually quite complex and perhaps that’s why nobody had ever thought to attack the problem in this way, simply accepting that the current methods of determining time worked fine. But these two Facebook engineers were annoyed by the limitations of these approaches and decided to build something better themselves.

“A lot of it came from frustration. We were frustrated with whatever exists in the market, and we needed certain features like security features to maintain different things and monitor what’s going on. And we had to always ask the vendors [for these new features] and every time a request would take like six months to one year, and [it wouldn’t be exactly what we wanted] and we had to change things all the time, so that’s why we had to basically make this from scratch in this way,” Obleukhov said.

One thing that made it possible to put a time keeping device on a PCIe card was the advances in miniaturization of the atomic clock/oscillator. So when you combine the timing of their frustration with the current capabilities of the technologies, they realized they could do this themselves if they dedicated themselves to the task.

As the design began coming together, the engineers decided to make it flexible to enable engineers to play off the basic design and drop in whatever components met their needs. Some might need highly sophisticated expensive parts, but others could get away with much cheaper parts, depending on their requirements.

They also decided early on to open source the design process, and to involve the Open Compute Project so that other companies and engineers could contribute to the design. “It was actually going to be open source from the get-go, and the reason for that is we needed to have community support. I didn’t want it to be just one in-house project and let’s say if I lost interest or the businesses lost interest [it could go away]. I wanted this to [keep going] regardless [of what happened],” Obleukhov said.

Today there are a dozen vendors involved in the project and a number of cards out there including the one designed by these engineers, as well as a commercial offering from Orilia, but the goal is to continue improving the design, and by making it open source, the community of companies and engineers involved will continue to improve it.

News: Cybersecurity giants NortonLifeLock and Avast merge in $8.1B deal

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US cybersecurity firm NortonLifeLock has confirmed it is acquiring British rival Avast in order to create a global consumer security powerhouse. The agreement, which comes just weeks after both companies confirmed they were in advanced discussions regarding a possible combination of the two brands, will see Avast stockholders receive cash and shares that value the deal at

US cybersecurity firm NortonLifeLock has confirmed it is acquiring British rival Avast in order to create a global consumer security powerhouse.

The agreement, which comes just weeks after both companies confirmed they were in advanced discussions regarding a possible combination of the two brands, will see Avast stockholders receive cash and shares that value the deal at $8.1 billion to $8.6 billion. That makes this merger the third-largest cybersecurity acquisition of all time, following Thoma Bravo‘s $12.3 billion takeover of Proofpoint and Broadcom’s $10.7 billion acquisition of Symantec’s enterprise business. 

NortonLifeLock, formed in 2019 as a spin-off from Symantec following the latter, says the deal will create an industry-leading consumer cyber safety business, unlock approximately $280 million of annual gross cost synergies, and dramatically expand its user numbers thanks to Avast’s 435 million-strong customer base.

“With this combination, we can strengthen our cyber safety platform and make it available to more than 500 million users,” NortonLifeLock CEO Vincent Pilette said in a statement. “This transaction is a huge step forward for consumer cyber safety and will ultimately enable us to achieve our vision to protect and empower people to live their digital lives safely.”

Avast, founded in 1988, focuses on cybersecurity software for consumers and small and medium-sized businesses and describes itself as one of the largest security companies. However, the company has not been without controversy during its near-25-year history; Avast was forced to shut down its marketing technology subsidiary Jumpshot last year after it was found to be peddling web browsing data that could be linked to individual users.

Once NortonLifeLock’s acquisition of the company is complete, Pilette will remain CEO of the new business, while Avast CEO Ondrej Vlcek will become president and join the board, the companies said.

“Our talented teams will have better opportunities to innovate and develop enhanced solutions and services, with improved capabilities from access to superior data insights,” Vlcek said. “Through our well-established brands, greater geographic diversification and access to a larger global user base, the combined businesses will be poised to access the significant growth opportunity that exists worldwide.”

The final name of the merged company has yet to be determined, but NortonLifeLock has confirmed it will be dual headquartered in the Czech Republic and Tempe, Arizona, and will seek to cut its number of employees from 5,000 workers to around 4,000 over the next two years. The combined company will be listed on the Nasdaq, rather than Avast’s current London Stock Exchange home.

The deal, which has been confirmed just weeks after NortonLifeLock bought free antivirus provider Avira for £360 million, is expected to close in mid-2022. 

News: Student rideshare service HopSkipDrive raises $25M to expand and invest in electrification

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Students around the country are about to return to school after the summer holiday, and they’re doing so at a time when both coronavirus transmission and the effects of climate change are mounting. Last year, HopSkipDrive, a rideshare platform for kids, had to let go much of its staff amid school lockdowns. Now, the company

Students around the country are about to return to school after the summer holiday, and they’re doing so at a time when both coronavirus transmission and the effects of climate change are mounting. Last year, HopSkipDrive, a rideshare platform for kids, had to let go much of its staff amid school lockdowns. Now, the company is betting that demand for its rideshare service will increase as parents send their kids back to school. To help fund that growth and expand into 30 new markets over the next year and a half, HopSkipRide raised $25 million in a Series C.

“We are also continuing to invest in our route optimization software, which just helps districts get more efficient and greener,” Joanna McFarland, CEO and co-founder, told TechCrunch. “By reducing overall fleet size, we play a significant role in the overall acceleration of the electrification of the entire yellow bus network.”

McFarland also said HopSkipDrive plans to use the new cash injection, which came from Energy Impact Partners, Keyframe Capital, FirstMark Capital and 1776 Ventures, to invest in electrification initiatives that will spur the company’s goal of helping its CareDrivers transition to electric vehicles affordably via partnerships with OEMs. Currently, hybrid or electric vehicles make up 19% of the startup’s CareDriver network vehicles, which are owned by gig economy workers similar to Uber or Lyft.

Unlike those rideshare giants, however, HopSkipDrive’s drivers have over five years of caregiving experience, and as a result, are predominantly women who enjoy flexible work schedules and the ability to contribute to the ridesharing economy without driving sketchy drunk people around at night.

HopSkipDrive is among a small handful of emerging startups dedicated to modernizing the public school bus system. Zūm, another student transportation service, has a similar mission statement with a different path to market. Whereas Zūm takes over the entire transportation system and even has lofty goals of acquiring 10,000 electric buses by 2025, HopSkipDrive focuses more on meeting the transportation needs that don’t neatly fit on a school bus or on a school route. 

“I think prior to Covid, we were really seen as an alternative transportation solution for districts, so helping with individualized transport solutions for students with special needs, for students experiencing homelessness or in foster care, and that’s the core service we offer today,” said McFarland. “But as we’ve seen during Covid, all of these trends have only been accelerated and districts have had to deal with a lot more of that than they ever have in the past, but they’re also suffering from a severe bus driver shortage that is reaching a critical point. So anytime you have less than 12 kids on a school bus, we are a cost effective solution, and we are also a much cleaner solution.”

HopSkipDrive’s more complementary approach has helped the company acquire contracts with over 300 districts in nine states plus Washington, D.C. During the pandemic, the startup signed on about 150 new contracts, and this year has renewed 100% of its existing contracts, many of them with price increases, according to McFarland.

Even as Delta variant cases continue to rise to record levels, schools are planning to reopen, which means services like HopSkipDrive’s will be essential. McFarland says the company has Covid SafeRide standards, which include policies around sanitization and mask-wearing, as well as anonymous exposure tracing via the app. 

“I don’t think we’ll see school closures again like we did in 2020,” said McFarland. “I think the tide has turned where everybody realizes that the cost of keeping kids out of school was far greater than the risk of them attending school in person.” 

News: ChargePoint acquires Amsterdam-based electric fleet manager ViriCiti

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ChargePoint has made its second acquisition since going public in March, purchasing European electric fleet management company ViriCiti for €75 million ($88 million) in cash. The news comes just a few weeks after the EV charging network operator announced the purchase of European charging software company has·to·be. Like the has·to·be buy, this newer deal will

ChargePoint has made its second acquisition since going public in March, purchasing European electric fleet management company ViriCiti for €75 million ($88 million) in cash. The news comes just a few weeks after the EV charging network operator announced the purchase of European charging software company has·to·be.

Like the has·to·be buy, this newer deal will beef up ChargePoint’s portfolio of hardware and vehicle management software for electric fleet customers, as well as add another 2,500 networked ports and 3,500 connected vehicles to its growing portfolio. ViriCiti customers include Chicago Transit Authority, San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority, British public transportation company Arriva and Berlin’s main public transport service Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe.

Beyond this customer base, ChargePoint CEO Pasquale Romano told TechCrunch the acquisition of ViriCiti will give the company access to a much larger software feature set for customers beyond ChargePoint’s core offerings of charger management and vehicle charger scheduling, like battery health monitoring, vehicle operations data and greater vehicle telematics capabilities.

“It’s really important for us here to make it easy for fleets to electrify and this [acquisition] is all about making us continually having the most complete offering for fleets,” Romano said.

ChargePoint operates the largest vehicle charging network in North America, with more than 115,000 charging points globally. The company also offers customers access to another 113,000 public charging spots through network roaming agreements. While the company might be best known for this extensive branded network, it also has a cloud subscription platform, as well as a considerable commercial and fleet division. The company went public in March after merging with blank-check company Switchback Energy Acquisition Corporation.

Some of ViriCiti’s services, like battery health monitoring, could be applicable for residential customers, or even simply for fleet customers that let employees take home or use a company vehicle full-time. “If you have vehicles that go home with the driver […] it would stand to reason that what you need to do in the take-home scenario is, your infrastructure needs to look like a logical extension of the infrastructure that you would have in your depots. So we’re pleasantly surprised at how much commercial and residential relevance there is.”

Crucially, ChargePoint will also be absorbing ViriCiti’s more than 50-person workforce, a whole team of mostly software engineers that will transfer their expertise to the new company. “If you just want to see evidence of where our mindset is, look at how many software engineers [are] in the sum total of those two acquisitions,” Romano said. “It’s the majority of both of those companies’ staffs are engineers, and they’re all software in general […] You can see where our focus is in terms of in terms of investment.”

News: Former Twitter and DreamWorks exec joins Acorns as CFO ahead of the fintech’s public debut

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As fintech Acorns plans to go public later this year, it has named former Twitter and DreamWorks animation exec Rich Sullivan to serve as its new chief financial officer. Irvine, California-based Acorns announced in May its intent to go public by merging with publicly traded special purpose acquisition company Pioneer Merger Corp. The SPAC values

As fintech Acorns plans to go public later this year, it has named former Twitter and DreamWorks animation exec Rich Sullivan to serve as its new chief financial officer.

Irvine, California-based Acorns announced in May its intent to go public by merging with publicly traded special purpose acquisition company Pioneer Merger Corp. The SPAC values the fintech company at $2.2 billion. 

Sullivan joins Acorns from Twitter, where he led corporate finance and FP&A. Prior to Twitter, he held executive positions at STX Entertainment and DreamWorks Animation, where he served as the company’s Deputy CFO. Sullivan has also held various roles at AT&T.

Image Credits: Rich Sullivan / Acorns

Acorns CEO Noah Kerner told TechCrunch that he was drawn to the executive’s experience in subscriptions, family and in “high-growth” technology as he thought about the consumer fintech’s long-term roadmap.

“Those are obviously all really relevant to what we’re doing at Acorns,” he said. 

Since its 2012 inception, the company has evolved its offering to also include investment services, debt management and a product aimed at children, Acorns Kids. It has more than 4 million subscribers that have invested nearly $10 billion through its app. The company touts nearly 99% monthly retention, and has the ambitious goal of reaching 10 million subscribers by 2025, according to Kerner. This year, he is projecting 60% to 70% CAGR growth.

For his part, Sullivan believes that his experience of more than two decades of working for several public companies in various roles will be valuable to Acorns in the process of going public.  

He told TechCrunch he was drawn to the company’s “mission-driven approach to put responsible tools of wealth in everyone’s hands by making investing easy and accessible to a large portion of the market that basically is underserved from the financial services industry, at least in the traditional sense.”

“I think it’s uniquely positioned as a high-growth business and also an interesting space that sits at the cross-section of fintech services and social responsibility,” Sullivan added. “As an industry leader with over 4 million subscribers with a really large addressable market, I think Acorns has an opportunity to be one of the most impactful companies in the space.” 

Along that vein, Acorns launched ESG portfolios, also known as sustainable portfolios, that are powered by Blackrock shares. (ESG stands for Environmental, Social, & Governance). Kerner said the move was in part driven by customer demand.

“The strategy there is really to allow our customers to not just invest in themselves, but also in a better planet,” he said. 

The role is not a newly created one for the popular saving and investing app. Jasmine Lee has served a dual role as chief operating officer and CFO, and helped prep Acorns for the public market. She will now focus on executing Acorn’s strategic plan and overseeing the day to day operations as COO, the company said.

News: Founded by a Freshworks alum, sales commission platform Everstage gets $1.7M seed funding

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For sales representatives, commissions are source of motivation—and frustration, too. Commission structures are often complex, and become even more labyrinthine as companies grow. “There is a standard fee, then there’s an implementation fee, there could be a multiplier bonus, there could be accelerators when you reach your quota and get higher quota numbers,” explained Siva

Everstage founding team Vivek Suriyamoorthy and Siva Rajamani

For sales representatives, commissions are source of motivation—and frustration, too. Commission structures are often complex, and become even more labyrinthine as companies grow. “There is a standard fee, then there’s an implementation fee, there could be a multiplier bonus, there could be accelerators when you reach your quota and get higher quota numbers,” explained Siva Rajamani, the co-founder and chief executive officer of no-code sales commission automation platform Everstage. A lot of this is calculated on spreadsheets by finance teams, so salespeople have limited visibility into how much they are earning. 

Everstage was created to provide more transparency about sales commissions. Sales representatives and other customer-facing employees get real-time data about their performance. They can also use Everstage to forecast the potential commissions form their deals pipeline, giving them incentive to close more sales. The platform uses a modular system, so as companies grow, they can add more automated commission calculations without having to code anything.

Founded in 2020, the platform’s early customers include notable SaaS companies like Chargebee, Postman and Lamdatest. Everstage announced today that it has raised a $1.7 million seed round led by 3One4 Capital. Angel investors included Rippling co-founder Prasanna Sankar; Chargebee co-founders Krish Subramanian and Rajaraman Santhanam; Freshworks chief revenue officer Sidharth Malik; Conga chief technology officer Koti Reddy; Ally.io CEO Vetri Vellore; and RFPIO CEO Ganesh Shankar. The company is headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware, with an office in Chennai, India.

Before starting Everstage with Vivek Suriyamoorthy, the startup’s chief technology officer, Rajamani served as the head of business SaaS provider Freshworks’ global revenue operations team, working closely with sales representatives. During his tenure, Freshworks’ annual recurring revenue grew from $30 million a year to $300 million. 

Rajamani told TechCrunch that a lot of early-stage startups put more than 10% of their budget toward commissions. 

“Commissions obviously motivate and drive performance from these teams, but what started as a way to motivate gradually became a point of distrust because none of these folks had visibility into how they’re getting paid,” he said. “Plans got complex, and pretty much any salesperson you speak to at these companies will say they have their own shadow accounting.” 

“Shadow accounting” means salespeople keep their own records of the deals they close and calculate commissions by themselves. But the process can be tedious, especially if their calculations don’t match financial teams. This problem has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, because salespeople can’t walk over to the finance department and ask about the status of their commissions.

Sometimes this results in high turnover as frustrated salespeople leave for companies that offer them more clarity about their earnings potential. 

“People want to chose companies that are very transparent about their commissions process and how their quotas are set, because that’s the only way they can assure themselves they can make money,” Rajamani said. “Otherwise promises made on paper are just on paper.” 

Everstage’s dashboard for sales representatives

Having visibility also motivates people. Everstage’s gamification features allows salespeople to look at their current quotas and deals pipeline, and forecast how much they can potentially earn, broken down by their commission plans, including deal attainment, implementation fees and multiplier bonuses. 

“At the end of the day, incentives and particular criteria, like multiplier bonuses, drive salespeople to close more contracts, or multi-year contracts,” Rajamani said. “If they can see how much more commission they can make if they close a deal as a multi-year contract, then it’s an added incentive.” 

Everstage is currently works primarily with SaaS companies, but also sees inbound interest from insurance, real estate, pharmaceuticals and biotech. The platform is sector-agnostic and can be customized for different types of commission plans. 

Rajamani notes that sales commissions management software is not a new area. For example, players like SAP CallidusCloud and Xactly have been around for years. 

Over the last year, newer sales commissions platforms have also raised, including CaptivateIQ and Spiff. This is in part because many high-growth companies have adjusted incentives for their sales team as they work remotely during the pandemic. 

There is some overlap between Everstage’s features and its competitors, but its main differentiators are its modular approach and emphasis on gamification. “We want to move away from automating busywork for revenue operations and finance, and move towards the gamification aspect, so the gamification is an additional module,” he said. “Other indicators—quota setting, target setting and overall company targets broken down by percentage, managers, regions—all those are also there.” 

In a statement about the funding, 3One4 Capital Anurag Ramdasan said, “As customer acquisition and retention have increased in complexity with more roles and workflows than ever, Rev Ops teams have become mandatory to align incentives and drive revenue. With their considerable experience, the Everstage founding team is well-positioned to help Rev Ops teams succeed, starting with real-time commission planning and visibility, and we’re excited to partner with them.” 

News: Mirthy raises $1.1M pre-Seed funding to build out platform for sprightly Boomers

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As Baby Boomers (aged 57-75 at this point) and Gen X (aged 41-56) head into their dotage, they are no longer the “senior citizens” of yore, being still active and, often, healthy. But leaving work means they lose about half of their social network, which has a negative impact on wellbeing. Plus, the pandemic increased

As Baby Boomers (aged 57-75 at this point) and Gen X (aged 41-56) head into their dotage, they are no longer the “senior citizens” of yore, being still active and, often, healthy. But leaving work means they lose about half of their social network, which has a negative impact on wellbeing. Plus, the pandemic increased loneliness levels with COVID lockdowns.

Mirthy’s platform allows over 60s to host or participate in free or ’affordable’ activities, socialising online and eventually offline as well. It’s aiming to become the “go-to platform for all over 60s’ social, physical and financial needs” thus capturing an increasingly large and wealthy market.

It’s now raised $1.1M pre-Seed funding led by Ascension’s ‘Fair By Design’ fund, with participation from Ada Ventures, Redrice Ventures and True.

Co-Founders Alex Ramamurthy and Dhruv Haria were inspired by the negative impact of social isolation and loneliness on their parents’ mental and social wellbeing. Ramamurthy has been Chairman of the Care Innovation Hub incubator. Haria is a Cambridge Grad (Maths), qualified Actuary, and Data Scientist with a background in the Finance and Technology domains.

Ramamurthy said: “Both Dhruv and I witnessed the effects retirement was having on our parents. We noticed how their wellbeing was being affected by their decreasing social circles and the increasing inactive free time they had alone.”

Users for Mirthy can get access to fitness classes to belly dancing workshops, and history lectures to piano concerts at home, delivered by hosts, most of them over 60. The startup now claims over 35,000 users since launch in April-2020.

Its competitors include The Joy Club, Hello Revel, GetSetUp and several others. What Mirthy says, however, is that its content is created and curated “by over 60s for 60s” while “most of the other companies offer intergenerational events” and hosts are amateurs, passionate about a particular interest.

News: Construction management platform Remato raises $1.7M Seed from Passion Capital

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Small and medium-sized construction businesses in Europe and the US tend not to be run on digital platforms, leaving a $1.6 trillion industry relatively untouched. publicly-listed Procore (NYSE: PCOR) is the go-to platform for large general contractors, but newer startups are going for this SMB construction market such as Sitemax, Sitemate, Fieldlens and Fieldwire. Now,

Small and medium-sized construction businesses in Europe and the US tend not to be run on digital platforms, leaving a $1.6 trillion industry relatively untouched. publicly-listed Procore (NYSE: PCOR) is the go-to platform for large general contractors, but newer startups are going for this SMB construction market such as Sitemax, Sitemate, Fieldlens and Fieldwire.

Now, the Remato construction management platform is joining them with a $1.7 million seed investment round, led by London-based Passion Capital.
 
Additional investors in the financing round include founders and early team members of Pipedrive along with venture funds Superangel, Lemonade Stand, Spring Capital, and Kaamos Group – a long-standing property developer and general contractor. The new investment brings Remato’s total funding up to $2.5 million. Remato currently has customers in the Nordics and Baltics.
 
Founded in 2018, Remato says its platform allows field contractors to plan and manage budgets, labor, materials, and equipment on one app. The company says it is growing steadily at 10-15% MoM with a mobile-first user experience and now has 1,700 daily active users.

Co-founder and CEO Madis Lehtmets said: “The construction industry needs simplicity and modern design to achieve the mass adoption of software. We believe that user experience should be much more of a priority, as frontline adoption depends on it. It helps the traditionally low-tech industry to go fully digital.”  

Eileen Burbidge, Partner at Passion Capital, said: “We’re very excited to be working with Remato. Their traction to date clearly validates the need for digital user experiences and platforms for the massive construction sector, which comprises 10% of the global economy. We look forward to supporting the team’s ambitions in the UK, across the rest of Europe, and North America.”