salesforce ventures Archives - SA国际传媒 News /tag/salesforce-ventures/ Data-driven reporting on private markets, startups, founders, and investors Wed, 26 Feb 2020 21:53:04 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.5 /wp-content/uploads/cb_news_favicon-150x150.png salesforce ventures Archives - SA国际传媒 News /tag/salesforce-ventures/ 32 32 Process Street Raises Accel-led $12M Series A For No-Code Workflow Builder /venture/process-street-raises-accel-led-12m-series-a-for-no-code-workflow-builder/ Thu, 27 Feb 2020 15:00:25 +0000 http://news.crunchbase.com/?p=25884 , which has developed no-code workflow builder, has raised a $12 million Series A led by .

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, 1 and others also participated in the round.

Australian-born came up with the idea for Process Street when running a distributed marketing agency through contractors all over the world. The spreadsheets and project management tools were causing more problems than solutions, he said.

So, the concept behind Process Street was born. Initially, it was an internal tool to structure and manage internal workflows by doing things like documenting and tracking simple checklist-based processes for Patankar鈥檚 company.

But then Patankar teamed up with to form a company based on that initial concept while both were staying at a hostel in Argentina.

Today, Process Street has evolved into 鈥渁 fully-fledged no-code workflow builder with an easy-to-use interface that can handle almost any type of business process, from client implementation to employee onboarding and content approvals,鈥 according to Patankar. And it does this by giving small-and-medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and enterprises the ability to create those workflows without having to write code. (Customers are mostly SMBs, with 10 to 20 percent being enterprises.)

The company services over 450,000 registered users 鈥 both free and paid 鈥 including enterprise customers like , , and , as well as institutions like and .

鈥淧rocess Street lets you build these workflows and plug them into other SaaS products, all without engineering,鈥 Patankar told SA国际传媒 News. 鈥淚t鈥檚 the same as a SAP workflow, for example, but for those you need an engineer to come in and design the flow, build integrations and connect the whole thing. Instead, we sell directly into sales or to a customer success manager.鈥

Over time, the company realized that remote team use was still a 鈥減retty small market,鈥 despite growing fast. So it began to focus on an even greater market–enterprises with distributed teams 鈥渓ooking to standardize and automate work across vast geographical areas.鈥

鈥淪o, while some of these companies are not technically remote, they have a lot of the same challenges as a larger, distributed team,鈥 Patankar said.

As a fully distributed company itself, Process Street has 45 employees working across North America and Europe. It鈥檚 grown its revenue to the $3 million to $4 million range and previously raised about $3 million across two seed rounds.

The strategy

The choice of investors was largely strategic, according to Patankar. As part of the financing, Accel Partner will join Process Street鈥檚 board. Accel, Patankar said, made sense to lead the round considering its understanding of the SaaS space.

鈥 is a very intriguing story of a fully distributed team building no-code workflow tools for all types of other distributed teams around the world,鈥 Wong told me.

The company鈥檚 customers integrate with hundreds of different SaaS products, and Salesforce, and are among the most popular, according to Patankar. As such, Salesforce Ventures and Atlassian were 鈥渙bvious partners.鈥

鈥淧rocess Street workflows are tightly integrated with other SaaS products and rely on the data and activity happening in these systems to automate work,鈥 he said.

Looking ahead

Process Street鈥檚 ultimate goal 鈥渋s to be the no-code workflow solution for teams everywhere.鈥

As part of that mission–and what some of its new capital will go toward–the company will be launching a mobile app, introducing more enterprise features and opening up greater API access so that users can control their data and build custom automations.

Process Street also has a large library of premade plug-and-play process templates created by its team, customers and partners. It plans to grow that library with the goal of making it 鈥渢he largest repository in the world for all business processes and operational playbooks.鈥

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  1. Salesforce Ventures is an investor in SA国际传媒. They have no say in our editorial process. For more, head here.

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Snowflake Gets $479M, Reaches Decacorn Status With $12.4B Valuation /venture/snowflake-gets-479m-reaches-decacorn-status-with-12-4b-valuation/ Mon, 10 Feb 2020 16:53:19 +0000 http://news.crunchbase.com/?p=25260 Data warehouse startup raised $479 million in a new round of funding, bringing the company鈥檚 valuation to a whopping $12.4 billion.

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New investors and 1 co-led the round, which comes along with a new partnership with Salesforce.

Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman said in an interview with SA国际传媒 News that the company wasn’t looking to raise money, as it is “well-capitalized” and hasn’t really dipped into the last round it raised. But with the new partnership with Salesforce, it needed to find a way to bring its new partner to the cap table.

鈥淲e would not have raised a round if it hadn鈥檛 been for the partnership,” Slootman said.

He wouldn’t give details about what the partnership entails (they’ll share more information during its conference in June), but said the vast majority of Snowflake customers are also Salesforce customers, and the startup has been getting requests to work with Salesforce for years.

鈥淎t a high level, the partnership is about allowing Salesforce data to very easily, seamlessly, frictionlessly be shared on the Snowflake platform,” he said.

There won’t be any real operational changes with the new funding, Slootman said, but some of the equity will be converted to cash. The company finished its 2019 fiscal year with 174 percent year-over-year revenue growth.

For sure, $479 million is a huge sum to raise, and an impressive valuation–about triple what it was last valued (about $3.9 billion). It also makes Snowflake even more special and rare than a regular old unicorn, as it鈥檚 now reached decacorn status.

San Mateo, Calif.-based Snowflake has been steadily increasing its funding amounts until this point. So, in the spirit of nostalgia, let鈥檚 take a look back at its funding history.

The Money

Snowflake raised just under $1 million ($900,000 to be exact) in a 2012 seed round, before securing its $5 million Series A led by Sutter Hill Ventures in August 2012. Its Series B came a little over two years later in October 2014, with $26 million in a round led by Redpoint. You can see its funding history below in a neat chart made by our own Jason D. Rowley.

The company netted $79 million in a Series C round led by Altimeter Capital in June 2015, before it started raising supergiant rounds (we define those as rounds of $100 million or larger).

Snowflake raised a $105 million led by in September 2017, with a post-money valuation of about $500 million, according to SA国际传媒. It reached unicorn status around the time of its $263 million in January 2018. According to SA国际传媒, the company had a pre-money valuation of $1.2 billion at the time.

The rounds have only continued to get bigger with Snowflake鈥檚 last round being a $450 million led by in October 2018.

So what鈥檚 next for Snowflake? Slootman said an IPO would be next, but the company is in no hurry. The earliest Snowflake could go public would be July, but that doesn’t mean they will then.

“We鈥檙e very focused on the content itself, which means the data, and driving high-value data assets onto the platform, which is what we view Salesforce to be,” Slootman said. “That data is very valuable, not all data is created equal.”

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  1. Salesforce Ventures is an investor in SA国际传媒. It has no say in our editorial process. For more, head here.

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Salesforce Ventures Brings Australian Startups $50M In New Fund /venture/salesforce-ventures-brings-australian-startups-50m-in-new-fund/ Tue, 05 Mar 2019 21:03:27 +0000 http://news.crunchbase.com/?p=17537 Salesforce Ventures that it is launching its fourth country-specific fund, this time to boost its involvement within Australia鈥檚 startup community. The aptly-named Australian Trailblazer Fund will invest $50 million into the early-stage space. 1

This fund tops off Australia-specific efforts Salesforce has been making since 2012, when it first started investing in the space. The company has invested in Australia鈥檚 , and , and Bugcrowd, to name a few.

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Bugcrowd founder said in that 鈥渢he establishment of Salesforce Ventures in Australia speaks volumes of the calibre of Australian entrepreneurs, as well as their forward-looking attitude.鈥

We haven鈥檛 written too much about Australian startups, but we鈥檇 love to change that (shoot me a note at natasha@crunchbase.com)

Let me give you some background on the startup scene Down Under. About half of Australian startups are actively trying to raise funds, according to . 听So far in 2019, top deals include a mortgage lending startup raising $40 million in a venture round led by ANZ, and , a 3D machine vision systems manufacturer that raised a $32 million Series A.

Salesforce鈥檚 bet on Australia鈥檚 early-stage tech market makes sense as other groups are already investing into the region. Like government initiative , which says on its website that it will offer $57 million in funding to 鈥渉elp start-ups and small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in regional NSW succeed and create more local jobs in regional communities across the State.鈥

Part of its efforts are visible in its relatively new startup incubator, the Sydney Startup Hub. Last month it celebrated its first anniversary and shared that its 480 startups raised over $182 million in the past year. 听NSW plans to invest $35 million in the hub over the next 5 years, a.

In short, Salesforce Ventures鈥 new fund has an audience.

Also notable: the fund is comparatively less than the other international launches Salesforce Ventures has made in the past two years: in December it launched a $100 million fund for Japan and in May it launched a $100 million fund for Canada.

Here鈥檚 the vintage, and size of the known Salesforce Ventures Funds:

 

Update, 3/08/2019: Salesforce reached out to SA国际传媒 News with a comment explaining the discrepancy in fund sizes between Australia, and previous international venture funds. Here is a statement from Matt Garratt, managing partner at听Salesforce听痴别苍迟耻谤别蝉:

础迟听Salesforce听Ventures, we have made some great investments in Australia, but the Australia Trailblazer Fund is really kick starting our focused investment in the country. In EMEA, Canada and Japan, we had already made several investments in those countries and had an established presence. For instance we had been investing in Japan for seven years before launching a fund. We sized the fund to reflect this.听
We are excited to support Australian entrepreneurs, and continue our investment in the country, and beyond in the broader APAC region.听Salesforce听Ventures is one of the only U.S. VCs with a dedicated Australian-specific fund 鈥 a $50m USD fund is in the top 25 VC funds for Australia. We also believe that relocating one of our most tenured team members, Rob Keith, reflects our commitment to the region

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  1. Salesforce Ventures is an investor in our parent company, SA国际传媒. As with all such conflicts we follow the rules detailed here, which dictate that no investor in SA国际传媒 gets special treatment from the News team. We do, however, try to note conflicts in articles where they arise in the regular course of our reporting.

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