In this photo illustration the Everbridge logo seen displayed on a smartphone.

Thoma Bravo takes critical event management software company Everbridge private in $1.8B deal

by with No Comment Tech

In this photo illustration the Everbridge logo seen displayed on a smartphone.

Image Credits: Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket / Getty Images

Everbridge, a critical event management (CEM) software company, is going private in a $1.8 billion all-cash deal that will see it taken over by private equity giant Thoma Bravo — 20% more than what was originally announced last month.*

Founded in 2002 initially as 3N Global, Everbridge helps governments and enterprises from across the industrial spectrum respond to emergency situations — this includes risk intelligence to help asses the threat landscape around where employees live or travel, as well as mass-notification tools to effectively communicate critical messaging during severe weather or terrorist attacks.

Everbridge went public on the Nasdaq in 2016, with its shares hitting an all-time high in September 2021 — the company reached a market cap of $6.4 billion, but this dropped by more than two-thirds within four months. Things never recovered, with its valuation hovering at below the $1 billion mark for the past six months.

Eventbridge
Image Credits: Eventbridge

Premium plan

Thoma Bravo, a private equity firm renowned for snapping up underperforming enterprise software firms, is effectively paying a premium in excess of 83%* on Everbridge’s market cap on February 2, the last day of trading before Thoma Bravo tabled a bid. Looking at the volume-weighted average share price (VWAP) over the previous three months, the deal represents a 62% premium, with shareholders netting $35.00 per share — $6.40 more than what was initially announced.*

At a time when geopolitical instability is expected to increase due to the number of elections taking place, alongside existing threats related to climate change and economic headwinds, Thoma Bravo clearly sees Everbridge’s suite of SaaS tools as being integral to companies looking to manage these risks.

“We look forward to working with Everbridge to expand their ability to capitalize on opportunities in an expanding marketplace for risk, compliance, and safety solutions,” Thoma Bravo partner Hudson Smith said in a press release. “The Everbridge product portfolio is already used by some of the world’s most-respected corporations and organizations to comprehensively monitor risk and manage critical events, and we see an extensive runway ahead for product innovation and profitable growth.”

The transaction is still subject to certain regulatory and shareholder approvals, but the company said it expects to close the deal in Q2 2024.

*This article was updated on March 1, 2024, with amended acquisition price and premiums after Everbridge’s “go shop” process yielded greater interest.

3D cloud with lock on it symbolizing cloud security.

Axonius, a specialist in cyber asset management, secures $200M at a flat $2.6B valuation

by with No Comment Tech

3D cloud with lock on it symbolizing cloud security.

Image Credits: Vertigo3d / Getty Images

Axonius, one of the bigger players in the world of enterprise asset management — understanding and monitoring the digital assets and infrastructure that make up an organization’s network — has raised $200 million more in funding to expand its business on the heels of the company’s growth. The company, now nearly five years on from launching, is on track for more than $100 million in ARR with about 500 large enterprises among its customers.

The investment is being co-led by Lightspeed and Accel, and it is coming in the form of an extension to Axonius’s existing Series E of $200 million led by Accel on its own — an investment that it raised almost two years ago to the day. As an extension round, the valuation is also remaining flat, at $2.6 billion. (Prior to that, the company raised a $100 million round in 2021 at a $1.2 billion valuation.)

Neither investor commented on why Axonius or they chose to run this extra equity funding as an extension rather than a new Series F, but it is not unusual at the moment to see even healthy startups raising at more conservative valuations, especially when the rounds are later, growth-stage investments.

“I didn’t feel the need to increase the valuation from the last round,” CEO and founder Dean Sysman said when asked about the decision.

“I never optimize for valuation right when we approach a funding round. We optimize for the best thing for the company for the long-term, and we see ourselves as a very, very long-term strategy because of the size of our problem and addressable market,” he said.

Despite the business crunch playing out in IT budgets and technology in general, the addressable market that Sysman is referring to has only grown over the years.

One of the most important aspects of a strong cybersecurity strategy today is awareness of attack surface: understanding what assets and services and interactions exist in a network is key to being able to protect malicious actors from entering it.

That’s easier said than done in today’s enterprise world. The rise of cloud services, containerization, big data analytics, microservices, a plethora of connected devices and work locations — including some with no humans involved at all — plus a range of legacy operations functioning alongside all of that are just a few of the developments that define how we work today. All of them together create a complicated, and typically non-static, “area” that represents the myriad ways that a malicious hacker might enter a network and do damage.

Axonius is one of a group of specialist firms building platforms to help manage this. In the case of Axonius, it provides what Sysman called “as close to real time as possible” snapshots of how the network looks at any given point. Close is the realistic and operative word here: Axonius covers everything on premises and in the cloud or elsewhere in the network, but some products and services just do not provide data on a real-time basis. “We’re really dependent on the data sources we get,” he said.

From there, it provides tools to detect when that snapshot has changed, and then suggestions for what actions to take as a result. There are some companies that aim to provide this information for data management, or for regulatory compliance, or to better track software spend (e.g., Xensam primarily focuses on software assets rather than end points and Vertice on expense management). Axonius’s primary objective is cybersecurity.

Companies that have signed on so far include Schneider Electric, News Corp, and Anheuser-Busch InBev, and the plan for New York–based Axonius is to use the investment both to continue enhancing the platform and to continue expanding to new markets.

Accel and Lightspeed declined to be interviewed for this story, but Lightspeed provided us with a single quote in answer to various questions we had.

“We’ve been a longstanding partner of Axonius, and we like to double down into our best performing companies. Axonius clearly fits the bill. Their growth path speaks for itself — being one of the fastest cyber companies on record to achieve $100 million ARR, reaching 1,000 platform integrations, and having evolved over the years from a single product asset management company to a broader management platform that controls an enterprises entire digital footprint, be it assets, software, SaaS, and more,” said Arsham Memarzadeh, partner at Lightspeed. “They’re well on their way to becoming a household name for any cyber or IT buyer.”

Looking up at Nvidia's headquarters with the sky behind it.

Nvidia acquires AI workload management startup Run:ai for $700M, sources say

by with No Comment Tech

Looking up at Nvidia's headquarters with the sky behind it.

Image Credits: VCG / Getty Images

Nvidia is acquiring Run:ai, a Tel Aviv-based company that makes it easier for developers and operations teams to manage and optimize their AI hardware infrastructure. Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed publicly, but two sources close to the matter tell TechCrunch that the price tag was $700 million.

CTech reported earlier this morning the companies were in “advanced negotiations” that could see Nvidia pay upwards of $1 billion for Run:ai. Evidently, the negotiations went off without a hitch, apart from a possible price change.

Nvidia says that it’ll continue to offer Run:ai’s products “under the same business model” and invest in Run:ai’s product roadmap as part of Nvidia’s DGX Cloud AI platform, which gives enterprise customers access to compute infrastructure and software that they can use to train models for generative and other forms of AI. Nvidia DGX server and workstation and DGX Cloud customers will also gain access to Run:ai’s capabilities for their AI workloads, Nvidia says — particularly for generative AI deployments running across multiple data center locations. 

“Run:ai has been a close collaborator with Nvidia since 2020 and we share a passion for helping our customers make the most of their infrastructure,” Omri Geller, Run:ai’s CEO, said in a statement. “We’re thrilled to join Nvidia and look forward to continuing our journey together.”

Geller co-founded Run:ai with Ronen Dar several years ago after the two studied together at Tel Aviv University under professor Meir Feder, Run:ai’s third co-founder. Geller, Dar and Feder sought to build a platform that could “break up” AI models into fragments that run in parallel across hardware, whether on-premises, in public clouds or at the edge.

While Run:ai has few direct competitors, other companies are applying the concept of dynamic hardware allocation to AI workloads. For example, Grid.ai offers software that allows data scientists to train AI models across GPUs, processors and more in parallel.

But relatively early in its life, Run:ai managed to establish a large customer base of Fortune 500 companies — which in turn attracted VC investments. Prior to the acquisition, Run:ai had raised $118 million in capital from backers including Insight Partners, Tiger Global, S Capital and TLV Partners.

In the blog post, Alexis Bjorlin, Nvidia’s VP of DGX Cloud, noted that customer AI deployments are becoming increasingly complex and that there’s a growing desire among companies to make more efficient use of their AI computing sources.

A recent survey of organizations adopting AI from ClearML, the machine learning model management company, found that the biggest challenge in scaling AI for 2024 so far has been compute limitations in terms of availability and cost, followed by infrastructure issues.

“Managing and orchestrating generative AI, recommender systems, search engines and other workloads requires sophisticated scheduling to optimize performance at the system level and on the underlying infrastructure,” Bjorlin said. “Nvidia’s accelerated computing platform and Run:ai’s platform will continue to support a broad ecosystem of third-party solutions, giving customers choice and flexibility. Together with Run:ai, Nvidia will enable customers to have a single fabric that accesses GPU solutions anywhere.”

Run:ai is among Nvidia’s biggest acquisitions since its purchase of Mellanox for $6.9 billion in March 2019.

Carbonfact is a carbon management platform designed specifically for the fashion industry

by with No Comment Tech

Image Credits: Carbonfact

French startup Carbonfact believes that the best carbon accounting solutions will focus on one vertical. That’s why the company has decided to provide a carbon management and reporting tool exclusively for the fashion industry.

Carbonfact recently raised a $15 million funding round led by Alven, a French VC firm that also led the startup’s seed round in 2022. Other investors in the round include Headline and Y Combinator, which also did a follow-on investment.

Big companies in the fashion industry (and other industries) need to come up with a carbon accounting strategy, as regulation is changing in Europe and the U.S. — the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), California’s Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act, and the NY Fashion Act all require extensive tracking and reporting of how sustainability issues affect a company’s business.

That’s why there has been a boom in carbon accounting platforms. The biggest ones, like Watershed, Persefoni, Sweep or Greenly, have an industry-agnostic approach. They help you track your carbon emissions and create reports in a more or less automated way.

But in a manner similar to Carbon Maps, which focuses exclusively on the food industry, Carbonfact is focusing on the fashion industry so that its product can be more granular and more specific.

“For these industries — food is a very good example, fashion is a very good example — you need to be accurate in your calculations. You need industry-specific tools to model virtual products and improve your product offering in the future,” Carbonfact’s co-founder and CEO, Marc Laurent, told TechCrunch in an interview.

Carbon data at the product level

Carbonfact retrieves companies’ data from their ERP and other internal systems, and then calculates the footprints for each product using a life cycle assessment engine that is specifically designed for clothing items.

“[Clients] also have data in what they call PLM [product lifecycle management software ] — that’s the software in which they put all the product data. This is where you’ll find the product recipe sheets. They sometimes have data in traceability platforms, such as Retraced, TrusTrace, Fairly Made in France, etc. And finally, they sometimes have data in Excel files,” Laurent said.

After centralizing and normalizing all that data in a single platform, as the fashion industry relies on a cascade of suppliers, Carbonfact wants to help companies calculate their scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions. Scope 3 emissions, in particular, encompass indirect emissions from third-party suppliers.

The startup first gives its clients a broad idea of their main emission hot spots with an uncertainty range. It then helps them prioritize data collection with suppliers to refine the data and improve carbon reporting.

After that, Carbonfact can become a customer’s carbon footprint dashboard. It lets you generate broad reports and drill down at the SKU level to see the environmental cost of each product. The platform can then be used to run “what-if” scenarios to see if you should change a material, move to a new country of manufacturing, or change your transport methods.

Image Credits: Carbonfact

While many companies will focus first on CO2-equivalent metrics, Carbonfact can also be used to track other metrics, such as water consumption, French eco-labels, and other environmental indicators. In the carbon accounting industry, they call these indicators the Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules, or PEFCR for short.

Carbonfact has already onboarded over 150 apparel and footwear brands, including New Balance, Columbia, Carhartt and Allbirds. “We track 100% of their subsidiaries, 100% of their suppliers, 100% of their products,” Laurent said.

Each client pays tens of thousands of dollars per year to use Carbonfact. With a little back-of-the-envelope calculation, if we consider that a client pays around $20,000 per year on average, it means that the French startup already generates at least $3 million in annual recurring revenue.

It’s clear that sustainability management software is a growing segment in the world of enterprise software. Still, it’s also a young sector. So it’s going to be interesting to see if several industry-specific platforms can become large companies, or if there will be some consolidation down the road.

WSO2 CEO Sanjiva Weerawarana speaks to media during a product launch in Colombo on February 26, 2014.

EQT snaps up API and identity management software company WSO2 for more than $600M

by with No Comment Tech

WSO2 CEO Sanjiva Weerawarana speaks to media during a product launch in Colombo on February 26, 2014.

Image Credits: Ishara S.KODIKARA/AFP / / WSO2 CEO Sanjiva Weerawarana speaks to media during a product launch in Colombo on February 26, 2014.

WSO2, a company that provides API management and identity and access management (IAM) services for enterprises, has been acquired by Swedish investment giant EQT.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but TechCrunch has learned via sources that the deal values WSO2 at “more than” $600 million, with EQT attaining a “significant majority” stake for the price.

WSO2’s products include an open source API manager, comparable to something like Google’s Apigee, which businesses use for building and integrating all their digital services, either in the cloud or on-premises. The company offers tangential services such as API management specifically for Kubernetes, as well as its flagship Identity Server — a little something like Okta — that companies use for managing identity and access functionality in their apps, such as single sign-on (SSO).

WSO2, which was founded out of Sri Lanka in 2005, had raised around $130 million in funding from the likes of Intel, Cisco and Goldman Sachs, with its most recent tranche coming via a $93 million Series E round in 2022. An official valuation was never announced, but articles from some outlets at the time reported a valuation of more than $600 million. So that would mean WSO2 has remained somewhat stagnant, though the “more than” facet here could disguise some movement in the company’s valuation.

A strong track record

WSO2 co-founder and CEO Sanjiva Weerawarana has a strong track record in the open source sphere, particularly among Apache Software Foundation projects, and he was one of the main designers of the cloud-native Ballerina programming language. Since 2017, Weerawarana also drives for Uber, which he says is designed to “challenge the norm” and make it more socially acceptable in his native Sri Lanka.

WSO2 is a fairly well-distributed company, in keeping with the ethos of other businesses founded around open source. While the company counts a U.S. HQ in Santa Clara, and many of its senior leadership team are spread across the U.S., its center of gravity lies in Sri Lanka where much of its workforce is located — including Weerawarana, who’s based in the capital Colombo.

With that in mind, it’s worth noting that the acquisition was actually made by an EQT subsidiary called EQT Private Capital Asia, formerly known as Baring Private Equity Asia, which EQT procured in 2022 for €6.8 billion to serve as its private equity vehicle for Asia.

With a global spread of customers that include AT&T, Honda and Axa, this is something that EQT Private Capital Asia partner Hari Gopalakrishnan says was a key part of its decision to invest. Moreover, with cloud computing and AI driving demand for security infrastructure, WSO2 was a particularly appealing proposition for an investment firm with recent form in the enterprise software space.

“Software is a key focus sector for EQT, and WSO2 is a strong company that has scaled globally with an enterprise customer base spread across the US and Europe,” Gopalakrishnan said in a statement. “[We] believe that the company is well-positioned to capitalize on long-term trends such as digital transformation and rising GenAI adoption.”

EQT say that it expects the acquisition to close in the second half of 2024.

SUSE goes private again

Sona, a frontline workforce management platform, raises $27.5M with eyes on US expansion

by with No Comment Tech

Sona co-founder Steffen Wulff Petersen flanked by Ben Dixon (left) and Oli Johnson (right)

Image Credits: Sona / Founders: Steffen Wulff Petersen flanked by Ben Dixon (left) and Oli Johnson (right)

Sona, a workforce management platform for frontline employees, has raised $27.5 million in a Series A round of funding.

More than two-thirds of the U.S. workforce are reportedly in frontline jobs, which might be anything from customer service and healthcare to retail environments and hospitality. But managing this vast workforce, ensuring roles are filled and service is delivered, is resource intensive. That is where Sona has been setting out to help since its foundation three years ago.

“Sona intelligently deploys our customers’ largest cost base — frontline labor,” Sona’s co-founder, Steffen Wulff Petersen, told TechCrunch. “This not only optimizes their cost base, it also directly drives more revenue — you can’t sell food or deliver care without staff being scheduled correctly.”

Founded in London in 2021, Sona helps companies manage just about every facet of their frontline workforce, from shift scheduling, timesheets and soliciting feedback to absence management and connecting with agencies to ensure shifts are covered during staff shortages.

Managers typically access Sona via a web portal, while workers access the platform via a mobile app with which they can complete timesheets, view available shifts and communicate with managers. Companies integrate Sona with their internal systems to ensure all the data flows through and between the various departments and stakeholders.

Sona in action
Image Credits: Sona

As one might expect in this day and age, Sona says it uses AI to automate many of the processes involved in managing a workforce, including optimizing rosters using data gleaned from workers’ contracts, such as their terms of employment, working preferences and availability. So, less time-consuming manual admin is the name of the game.

“Running a business with a large frontline workforce is primarily about ensuring the right people are in the right place at the right time,” Sona’s co-founder and CTO, Ben Dixon, told TechCrunch. “Sona becomes the central jumping off point for a large proportion of our customers’ operations, which means we integrate with nearly all of their other systems — from care management and point-of-sale, to single sign-on and ERP (enterprise resource planning). It’s this deep level of integration that facilitates our AI product, because we’re the one system that can provide a unified, real-time view of data across the whole business.”

Besides legacy players such as PeoplePlanner in social care and Selima in hospitality, there is no shortage of well-funded startups targeting a similar space to what Sona operates in — there is ConnectTeam and Homebase for starters, the latter of which announced a $60 million fundraise just last month.

Petersen says that it’s setting out to differentiate from at least some of these companies by focusing on larger enterprises, meshing “consumer-grade design” with features required by more complex multi-site operations.

“Most newer, VC-backed players in the workforce management space are built for SMBs, with an easy and simple self-signup product,” Petersen told TechCrunch. “That’s a great approach for small businesses with 1-10 sites, and there’s millions of those businesses to target. We rarely cross paths with the SMB vendors because enterprise customers need the opposite product — one that handles deep complexity.”

Indeed, Sona’s pitch isn’t that it’s quick to deploy: Petersen states that the demo alone takes three hours, and implementation takes more like several months. “Think Salesforce versus Pipedrive,” Petersen said. “We pass leads on to some of the SMB vendors when customers don’t meet our enterprise criteria.”

Expansion

Sona is currently live across the social care and hospitality industries in the U.K., where it counts the likes of Gleneagles and Estelle Manor as customers. With another $27.5 million in the bank, the company is now gearing up to expand further afield — and a clue to its target markets lie in its new lead investor.

The Series A round was led by Menlo Park-based VC firm Felicis, which has previously exited investments like Ring to Amazon, Fitbit to Google and publicly traded Shopify. Other notable backers include Google’s Gradient Ventures, which led Sona’s seed round two years ago. Antler, SpeedInvest, Northzone and Bag Ventures also participated in the latest round.

Sona has now raised north of $40 million since its inception, and the company said it will use its fresh cash injection to “build more advanced AI capabilities” and accelerate its international plans, which will include its first U.S. foray.

“The U.S. will be an important market for Sona. We now have both Felicis and Gradient onboard, have hired our first two U.S.-based employees and have signed our first six-figure Alpha customer,” Petersen said.

Vitesse, a payments and treasury management platform for insurers, raises $93M to fuel US expansion

by with No Comment Tech

Vitesse co-founder and CEO Phil McGriskin

Image Credits: Vitesse / Co-founder and CEO Phil McGriskin

U.K. fintech Vitesse has closed a $93 million Series C round of funding led by investment giant KKR.

KKR said it’s making the investment through its Next Generation Technology Growth Fund III, a $3 billion fund it closed last year.

Founded out of London in 2013, Vitesse is the handiwork of Paul Townsend and Phil McGriskin, who had sold an e-commerce payments company called Envoy to WorldPay back in 2011.

Vitesse targets insurance companies with an all-in-one treasury and payment management platform, replete with connections to a network of clearing systems designed to streamline international payments. The platform provides easy access to domestic banking services to remove friction from cross-border payments, as well as services like liquidity management, cash-flow forecasting, and real-time visibility into cash positions in a myriad of accounts and currencies.

Vitesse had raised an $8.4 million Series A round in 2020, followed by a $26 million Series B round two years later. With another $93 million in the bank, the company said it’s doubling down on its U.S. expansion efforts, supported by the appointment of banking veteran Curt Hess, who will spearhead its growth stateside.

Aside from lead backer KKR, Vitesse’s Series C round saw participation from existing investors Hoxton Ventures, Octopus Ventures, and Hannover Digital Investments.