China’s Mobike raises $600M to expand its bikes on-demand service worldwide
China’s Mobike raises $600M to expand its bikes on-demand service worldwide.
Mobike, one of two fast-emerging on-demand bike rental services, has landed $600 million in new funding as it seeks to expand its business outside of China.
The principle is simple: bikes are fitted with GPS trackers which allows them to be picked up from and left anywhere using an app.
With companies deploying thousands, and offering incentives to leave them in certain areas, the idea is that there should be enough supply in all parts of the city to enable rides at any place and at any time.
Mobike said it operates more than five million bikes, and its 100 million registered users take 25 million trips per day at peak times.
That’s just the beginning.
“We will accelerate the pace of global expansion and our new target is to be in 200 cities by the end of this year,” Davis Wang, CEO and Co-founder of Mobike, said in a statement.
The startup’s key rival is Ofo, another Chinese outfit.
It too has global ambitions, and it too has raised a truck-load of money.
Beyond China, Ofo launched in Singapore in February, it has a trial service in Cambridge, UK, and it has spoken of its ambition to launch its service in the U.S. too.
Alibaba is in talks to invest in Uber’s Southeast Asia rival Grab
Alibaba is in talks to invest in Uber’s Southeast Asia rival Grab.
Grab declined to comment.
Alibaba did not respond to a request for comment.
The company, which just turned five, claims 45 million downloads, over 900,000 drivers and 2.5 million daily rides across seven countries.
It isn’t yet clear whether an investment would come from Alibaba or Ant Financial — both have busy brokering deals to get an early foothold in Southeast Asia’s growing internet space.
Sources close to the deal told us that Alibaba and Ant Financial had been talks with the company but ultimately Tencent prevailed.
Go-Jek has not announced the new financing yet.
The rivalry is more acute in India, where Tencent backed homegrown Amazon rival Flipkart in a funding round that included participation from Microsoft and eBay.
Both Alibaba and Ant Financial made numerous investments in the firm prior to SoftBank pumping a massive $1.4 billion investment into Paytm last month.
Given their involvement in Paytm, it isn’t a huge surprise that these three names are in the mix for Grab.
Justin Kan confirms $10.5 million in funding for his legal tech startup Atrium LTS
Justin Kan confirms $10.5 million in funding for his legal tech startup Atrium LTS.
This week Kan confirmed that the company has completed its fundraising process, raising $10.5 million in what ended up being one of the biggest “party rounds” I’ve ever seen.
As a “power user” of legal services over a decade in the startup industry, through the foundation and fundraising of startups like Justin.tv as well as the work he’s done as an investor and advisor to companies through Y Combinator, Kan says he was frustrated by how little technology was being used in the process of interacting with various law firms.
“Why don’t law firms use project management software to track where they are in the process of completing a deal and let customers see that?” Kan asked.
“If you think about corporate legal work that’s done today, some part of it is art and then some of it is repeatable processes,” Kan told me.
It’s those repeatable processes that the Atrium team believes it can innovate on to make things more efficient.
Now onto the funding… As we reported, the round was led by General Catalyst, but what we didn’t know at that time is that the financing includes nearly 100 institutional and angel investors who came along for the ride.
Other participating firms include: 500 Startups, Arena Ventures, Balance Ventures, BeeNext, Binary Capital, Box Group, Brainchild, Caffeinated Capital, First Round Capital, Founders Fund, GGV Capital, Green Oaks, Greylock, Initialized Capital, Jackson Square Ventures, Liquid 2 Ventures, NEA, Oriza Ventures, Palapa Ventures, Palm Drive Capital, Shasta Ventures, Signia, Slow Ventures, Soma Capital, Struck Capital, SV Angel, Tekton Ventures and Thrive Capital Partners.
And here’s a list of all the angels investing in the round: Aarjav Trivedi, Adrian Aoun, Amitt Mahajan, Andrew Chen, Andrew Trader, Ari Kardasis, Armaan Ali, Arram Sabeti, Avichal Garg, Bennett Rogers, Brent Goldman, Brian Goodman, Brian Shin, Josh Buckley, Charles Forman, Charlie Songhurst, Chris Fanini, David Cheng, David Schellhase, Desmond Lim, Dharmesh Shah, Emmett Shear, Eric Glyman, Erik Torenberg, Eusden Shing, Matt Brezina, Gil Penchina, Greg Chang, Immad Akhund, Jack Newton, Jason Tan, Jenny Haeg, John Doerr, John Hering, Jon Dahl, Josh Reeves, Karim Atiyeh, Kevin Lin, Kyle Vogt, Lee Linden, Loren Vittetoe, Manish Shah, Matt Gamache-Asselin, Maxim Zasov, Michal Borkowski, Mike Ghaffary, Mikhail Seregine, Osuke Honda, Paul McKellar, Ranidu Lankage, Rene Reinsburg, Robin Chan, Ruchi Sanghvi, Sam Altman, Saurabh Gupta, Scott James, Steve Jang, Sujay & Sheel Tyle, Tikhon Bernstam, Travis VanderZanden, Wayne Chang, and Wei Guo.
Kan promises more to come — including more details about the tech the company is building and how it will begin offering that technology to customers — but in the meantime, you’ll probably just have to imagine all the reasons you hate your law firm and what you think they can do better, and take comfort in knowing that Justin is working to fix it.
Looking for an AI focused accelerator? This list is for you!
Looking for an AI focused accelerator?
Need a list of startup competitions, challenges, accelerators, etc.
One of those areas that requires some additional expertise is artificial intelligence.
Here are some of the accelerators that are focused specifically on mentoring companies in that space: “We are looking to help disruptive startups with innovative technologies, products, solutions and/or approaches in big data, data science, and artificial intelligence by providing them access to funding, mentors, subject matter experts, and data to help startups succeed.” “We support startups in becoming scalable by providing access to capital, market, community, and expertise” Investment amount: The startups selected for the AI accelerator by Rockstart will receive €20,000 cash.
Visible increase in auditability and cost-savings achieved due to reduced FTE operations cost by automating manual, labor-intensive business processes.
Increased efficiency, turnaround time and precision on data modeling and calculations achieved by focusing on real-time price for reporting related to treasury and finance regulations Portfolio companies: None yet “Zeroth.ai’s program focuses on the development of early-stage AI startups by providing hands-on mentorship and funding opportunities.”
Investment amount: A $100,000 convertible note is automatically offered to all Techstars companies upon acceptance, as well as $20,000 in exchange for 6% common stock.
Program benefits: Access to Techstars resources for life Acceleration in a 90-day Techstars program with intense, hands-on mentorship from Techstars Mentors Connections to the Techstars Network of over 5,000 founders, alumni and mentors globally 400 perks worth over $1M Office space for three months Demo Day and other investor connections Equity Back Guarantee, the only one of its kind in the industry Mentor makeup: Brad Feld, David Cohen, David Limp, Paul Bernard Portfolio companies: None yet “We built off the success of the Future Labs at NYU Tandon to create AI NexusLab, our four-month acceleration program in partnership with ff Venture Capital (ffVC).
Investment amount: In exchange for 8% equity, companies receive a $100,000 investment from ff Venture Capital Program benefits: The four-month program offers: More than $400,000 worth of services, including support from our in-house designer, legal and intellectual-property consulting by Lowenstein Sandler, credits from Amazon Web Services, IBM/SoftLayer, and others Companies become part of ff Venture Capital’s portfolio, with ongoing access to firm partners and acceleration team of operations professionals A student fellow from the NYU Tandon School of Engineering All cohorts are taken on a trip to the San Francisco Bay Area to meet with our Silicon Valley investor and entrepreneur network Mentor makeup: Matt Zeiler, Alex Poon, Fred Wilson, Bud Mishra, Doug Bemis Portfolio companies: Alpha Vertex, Behold.ai, Klustera, Cambrian Intelligence, HelloVera
Entelo steps up its AI game with $20M Series C
With both Workey and Mya nabbing rounds in the last few weeks, the timing is prime for a few players to seek advantage in the form of growth capital.
This seems to be exactly what Entelo, a six year old player in the space, is doing.
The company is announcing a $20 million Series C round of financing today led by U.S. Venture Partners with Battery Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Correlation Ventures participating.
The company then works to match prospects to its enterprise customers looking to identify and recruit top talent.
Unlike LinkedIn, Entelo doesn’t currently let individuals create their own accounts.
Instead, all operations happen in the background, with the exception of opt-out controls that allow anyone to request their profile be deleted at any time.
Accomplishing this will require Entelo to both collect additional unstructured data from non-traditional sources like GitHub and implement additional machine learning capabilities to allow enterprises to quickly identify and target top candidates.
Entelo faces competition from both sides of the market — younger AI-first startups and legacy players like LinkedIn.
Bischke believes his positioning best prepares Entelo to thrive when the dust settles.
To date, Entelo has signed over 600 companies up for its platform.
Mobile gaming company Scopely raises $60M
Mobile gaming company Scopely raises $60M.
The round was led by Revolution Growth, a firm led by former AOL executives Steve Case and Ted Leonsis (AOL owns TechCrunch), which targets startups outside Silicon Valley and New York.
(Scopely is headquartered in Los Angeles.)
Revolution’s Donn Davis is joining Scopely’s board of directors, while Greenspring, Sands Capital Ventures, Cross Creek Advisors and Pritzker Group Venture Capital also participated in the new round.
Its titles include The Walking Dead: Road to Survival, Wheel of Fortune Free Play and WWE Champions.
The company says it reaches more than 125 million players, with The Walking Dead alone generating hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue.
In the funding release, CEO Walter Driver noted that it’s been less than a year since Scopely raised its Series B, and he said the company is already profitable.
So why raise more funding?
“This capital infusion will enable us to expand the business through inorganic means [i.e., advertising] while we continue to execute on our path of organic growth in parallel,” Driver said.
Featured Image: Scopely
Codota raises $2M from Khosla as autocomplete for developers
Codota raises $2M from Khosla as autocomplete for developers.
In recent years, GitHub has fundamentally changed developer workflows.
Following in these footsteps, Israeli startup Codota wants to further optimize workflows for the often neglected developer community — this time with machine intelligence.
Codota interfaces with integrated development environments like Eclipse, expanding on intelligent code completion.
Co-founders Dror Weiss and Eran Yahav took advantage of open source code on the internet from GitHub and StackOverflow to build Codota.
All of this public code was fed into machine learning models to enable them to recognize higher-level meaning across blocks of code.
Words can be arranged in infinitely many ways to express a single thought or sentiment.
Of course natural language and code are not completely analogous.
Programs are more structured and meaning isn’t always strongly correlated with locality.
Because Codota has been trained on millions of API implementations, it can help offer up best practices to developers.
Athenex stock rises as Buffalo biotech goes public
Athenex stock rises as Buffalo biotech goes public.
Buffalo-based drug developer Athenex Inc. went public Wednesday.
But the shares fared better once the stock started trading shortly after 11 a.m., rising to $13 in late afternoon and closing at $12.56.
The company’s sale of 6 million shares of its stock will raise $66 million in gross proceeds for the company, which is developing a series of cancer drugs and plans to operate a major drug manufacturing facility in Dunkirk that is being built with $200 million in state funding.
After deducting underwriting expenses and other fees associated with the offering, the stock sale will yield roughly $55 million for the company, according to Buffalo News estimates.
Athenex, when it first announced plans for the stock sale, had hoped to raise about $100 million, which would be used to help fund its operations and pay for costly clinical trials that are needed to bring its drug candidates to market.
The company, which relies on money raised from investors to finance its operations since its operations generated only $20.5 million in revenue last year, has said the proceeds of the stock offering will provide it with enough money to meet its funding needs for at least a year.
Athenex reported a loss of more than $87 million last year, mainly because of the cost of the drug trials.
Athenex’s work extends beyond potential cancer treatments.
Johnson Y.N.
Athenex announces pricing of initial public offering
Athenex announces pricing of initial public offering.
BUFFALO — Athenex, Inc., a global biopharmaceutical company dedicated to the discovery, development and commercialization of novel therapies for the treatment of cancer, Wednesday announced the pricing of its initial public offering of 6 million shares of its common stock at a price of $11 per share.
Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC, Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. and J.P. Morgan Securities LLC are acting as joint book-running managers for the offering.
ICBC International Securities Limited is acting as co-manager.
A registration statement relating to the securities being sold in this offering was declared effective by the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday.
Founded in 2003, Athenex, Inc. is a global clinical stage biopharmaceutical company dedicated to becoming a leader in the discovery and development of next generation drugs for the treatment of cancer.
Athenex is organized around three platforms including an Oncology Innovation Platform, a Commercial Platform and a Global Supply Chain Platform.
The Company’s current clinical pipeline is derived from two different platform technologies Athenex calls Orascovery and Src Kinase Inhibition.
The Src Kinase Inhibition platform refers to novel small molecule compounds that have multiple mechanisms of action, including the inhibition of the activity of Src Kinase and the inhibition of tubulin polymerization during cell division.
Athenex’s employees worldwide are dedicated to improving the lives of cancer patients by creating more active and tolerable treatments.
India’s MobiKwik is raising new funding at $1B valuation to battle payment rival Paytm
India’s MobiKwik is raising new funding at $1B valuation to battle payment rival Paytm.
With high-profile investments from Alibaba and SoftBank fueling an impressive growth story since demonetization last year, you could be forgiven for thinking that Paytm has India’s payments market sewn up.
MobiKwik, the mobile payments startup that is number two to Paytm in India, is quietly confident that it can take advantage of its rival’s focus on e-commerce and recent entry to banking to even the playing field.
To strengthen its case, MobiKwik, which is solely focused on payments, is in the process raising its largest financing from investors to date.
Paytm has risen to become India’s second highest-valued private tech firm — behind only Flipkart — with a valuation of $7 billion following a huge $1.4 billion investment from SoftBank and a $200 million round led by Alibaba.
Paytm and its parent company One97 have raised over $2.5 billion from investors.
In the immediate aftermath, traffic grew 435 percent, downloads jumped 200 percent and overall transactions increased by 250 percent.
The firm finished the year with 177 million mobile wallet customers — up from 122 million a year earlier — and it went on to cross the 200 million mark at the end of February.
MobiKwik’s ambitious target is to sustain that growth and reach 100 million users and 10 million merchants in the next year.
“Our payment gateway business has seen crazy growth — demonetization has been great for us, all business numbers have grown at least 3X,” Taku said.
Uber rival Careem closes $500M raise at $1B+ valuation as Daimler steps in
Uber rival Careem closes $500M raise at $1B+ valuation as Daimler steps in.
Careem, a transportation startup currently in 80 cities across the Middle East, has raised another $150 million — closing out a $500 million Series E round that it confirmed in December when it announced the first $350 million tranche.
(A source confirms to us that the overall $500 million is being led by Rakuten, which invested in the first tranche.)
The size of the round speaks of the opportunity that investors see right now to grow more regional transportation services — both in direct competition with Uber and incumbent forms of transportation as well as to simply to tap a very big opportunity.
“When it comes to ride hailing, Uber is the primary competitor, but between us we’re serving just one percent of the opportunity,” he said, “so the biggest challenge is just growing.
While women can drive in some places, in many they cannot, and many simply do not.
The wallet also acts as a credit account for the highest-rated passengers.
While Daimler’s investment is another step in how the carmaker continues to fill out its regional ride-sharing portfolio — notably in a market where Mercedes Benz (part of Daimler) is a very popular make — Sheikha notes that it’s also an opportunity for Careem to tap into some of the technology that Daimler is working on for the next generation of cars.
Daimler has already been working with Uber on self-driving pilots, and has set a target to have self-driving cars on the road in the next five years, so this will give it one more channel to market: via its strategic investment in Careem.
Another interesting strategic aspect of this round is the fact that not only does Daimler have other transportation startups in its portfolio, but Careem now has multiple investors who also back another big ride-sharing company, Lyft in the US.
Korean e-book service Ridibooks scores $20M Series C
Korean e-book service Ridibooks scores $20M Series C. E-book sales may be declining in the U.S. and U.K., but in South Korea, many people still enjoy swiping instead of leafing through their reading material.
E-book sales there are growing steadily each year, driven in part by the popularity of web comics.
Ridibooks, which claims to be Korea’s largest e-book provider, has raised a $20 million Series C to take advantage of the market.
Investors in the round include Praxis Capital Partners, ShinHan Finance Investment, and Company K Partners.
The capital will be used to improve the user experience of Ridibooks’ products, which now include Ridibooks, its main bookstore, an e-reader called Ridipaper, and Ridistory, a platform it launched in January for serialized novels and web comics.
TaeWoo Kim, Ridibooks’ business manager, says e-book sales in Korea are increasing about 25 percent to 30 percent every year.
Ridistory was launched in response to user demand for serialized novels and comics and its top-selling title, a romance novel called “Under the Oak Tree,” has already hit one million views.
Ridibooks made $50 million in revenue last year and currently has more than 2.5 million users who have downloaded a total of 175 million e-books.
Its stores have 784,000 titles from 2,000 publishers.
Along with its previous rounds, including an $8 million Series B closed at the end of 2014, Ridibooks has raised $35 million to date.
A startup school — for investors
But on one recent evening, it was investors making the pitch.
TMCx and the local accelerator Station Houston are trying to persuade wealthy people looking for investments to take a chance on the region’s startups as they try to spur innovation and develop a Silicon Valley-like tech startup scene where capital mixes easily with new ideas. “We need you to join us in investing in these companies,” said SnapStream Media founder Rakesh Agrawal, who himself also has made small seed investments in dozens of young businesses.
For Houston, say Agrawal and others working to build a startup scene, the solution is redirecting some to the wealth that abounds here.
The goal: Persuade people with money to put it to work locally.
RELATED: Business groups lay out plans to boost tech An audience of well-groomed businesspeople munching on catered hors d’oeuvres listened raptly as successful early-stage investors made the case for putting money into local startups. “I have clients who take risk in the tech industry, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be locally,” Goossen says.
RELATED: In a city where bigger is better, can Houston build a startup scene?
But DeToto, listening to the pitches, said he could see his clients getting interested in local tech companies as the city builds momentum behind the sector.
When a panelist asked how many people in the audience had lost money on startups, a smattering of hands went up.
YC-backed Py is a Duolingo style learn-to-code app
The fledgling startup is the brainchild of two friends and college computer science majors who found themselves repeatedly asked for advice on how to learn to code.
“We’ve been very focused on programming for a while but programming applied to, say, iOS development or making a website or data science,” says Lo.
We’re very excited to be launching those kind of courses that will give people a real understanding of how this actually gets applied.” The Py app offers around 10 free “courses” at this point — including the likes of Javascript, Swift, Python and HTML/CSS.
It’s best described as fitting into the mould of (non-computer) language learning apps — of which there’s also a rich variety these days (Duolingo, Babbel, Verbling etc) — offering budding developers similarly engaging touchscreen-based interactions as a route for learning.
So again it’s like this very interactive, fun, gamified way — similar to Duolingo in some ways.” He says they’re also working on another interaction type they’re calling “code response” — which makes use of a custom keyboard (of their own making) to simplify the fiddly process of typing actual code on a mobile.
“It’s almost like Angry Birds where if you do the game you’ll be able to get anywhere between one and three stars and so that’s the same with us — there are a certain number of quizzes for each module… And you’ll get a certain percentage of them right.
So this really incentivizes people to actually learn it and learn it well,” says Lo.
And while Py is generally focused towards the more basic/starter stage of learning to code at this point, i.e. for people who don’t much prior knowledge, Lo is excited about the potential to use the mobile learning framework they’re building as a delivery medium for more advanced learning too.
And that potential is what’s got Yale excited, according to Lo.
And that’s what excites us about YC.” Can anyone learn to code?
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative pledges $5M to home down payments for teachers
When housing costs too much or educators have to commute from far away, there’s rapid teacher turnover that hurts students.
That’s why Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s philanthropy vehicle is funding home down payment assistance for roughly 60 educators and support staff at three schools near Facebook’s headquarters.
The $45 billion Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is putting $5 million into a fund for Landed, a Y Combinator startup that offers to pay up to half of the 20% home down payment for educators with zero interest or monthly payments.
Instead, Landed recoups its investment when the home is sold or refinanced, assuming up to 25% of the appreciation or depreciation of the home’s value.
Any money earned from the upside on the Landed’s investment will be put back into the CZI fund to make it sustainable and fund down payments for more educators.
To get access to the Landed fund, educators in the designated districts can apply on its website.
They show up to work earlier than most of us, and have to be on point managing children all day instead of spacing out in front of a computer.
The closer they live to their school, the more time and energy they have for inspiring kids.
The hope is that since home values trend upward over time, educators will have enough from their Landed deal’s upside to buy their next home unassisted.
Instead of just giving away the $5 million, these quasi-loans that can actually generate more money could become an evergreen fund for housing assistance.
Element AI, a platform for companies to build AI solutions, raises $102M
Element AI, a platform for companies to build AI solutions, raises $102M.
The race for artificial intelligence technology is on, and while tech giants like Google and Facebook snap up top talent to build out their own AI-powered products, a new startup has just raised a huge round of funding to help the rest of us.
Element AI — a Montreal-based platform and incubator that wants to be the go-to place for any and all companies (big or small) that are building or want to include AI solutions in their businesses, but lack the talent and other resources to get started — is announcing a mammoth Series A round of $102 million.
“Our goal remains to lower the barrier for entry for commercial applications in AI,” said Jean-François Gagné, the CEO of Element AI, in an interview.
We’ve asked Gagné and Element AI’s investors, but no one is disclosing the valuation.
However, what we do know is that the startup already has several companies signed up as customers and working on paid projects; and it has “hundreds” of potential companies on its list for more work.
Element AI says that initial products that can be picked up there include predictive modeling, forecasting models for small data sets, conversational AI and natural language processing, image recognition and automatic tagging of attributes based on images, ‘aggregation techniques’ based on machine learning, reinforcement learning for physics-based motion control, compression of time-series data, statistical machine learning algorithms, voice recognition, recommendation systems, fluid simulation, consumer engagement optimization and computational advertising.
I asked, and I was told multiple times, that essentially colocating their R&D next to other first, for now, is not posing a problem for the companies who are getting involved.
“That model is what made Yoshua Bengio” — “the godfather of machine learning” — “so excited about co-founding this company,” Ocko said.
“That massive research advantage leads Element AI to be able to deliver technically advantaged, increasingly cost effective solutions.
Element AI, a platform for companies to build AI solutions, raises $102M
Element AI, a platform for companies to build AI solutions, raises $102M.
The race for artificial intelligence technology is on, and while tech giants like Google and Facebook snap up top talent to build out their own AI-powered products, a new startup has just raised a huge round of funding to help the rest of us.
Element AI — a Montreal-based platform and incubator that wants to be the go-to place for any and all companies (big or small) that are building or want to include AI solutions in their businesses, but lack the talent and other resources to get started — is announcing a mammoth Series A round of $102 million.
“Our goal remains to lower the barrier for entry for commercial applications in AI,” said Jean-François Gagné, the CEO of Element AI, in an interview.
That is the opportunity.” The company currently has 105 employees and the plan is to ramp that up to 250 in the next couple of months, he said.
“We’ve started to put together a business network, including taking positions in startups to help them by investing capital, resources, providing them with technology and bringing them all the tools they need to accelerate the development of their apps and help them connect with large corporates who are their customers.” The strategic investors also fit into different parts of Element AI’s business funnel.
AI in its early days may have been the domain of tech companies like Google, Apple and IBM when it came to needing and commercializing it, but these days, the wide range of solutions that can be thought of as AI-based, and applications for it, can touch any and all aspects of a business, from back-office functions and customer-facing systems, through to cybersecurity and financial transactions, to manufacturing, logistics and transportation, and robotics.
Element AI says that initial products that can be picked up there include predictive modeling, forecasting models for small data sets, conversational AI and natural language processing, image recognition and automatic tagging of attributes based on images, ‘aggregation techniques’ based on machine learning, reinforcement learning for physics-based motion control, compression of time-series data, statistical machine learning algorithms, voice recognition, recommendation systems, fluid simulation, consumer engagement optimization and computational advertising.
“That model is what made Yoshua Bengio” — “the godfather of machine learning” — “so excited about co-founding this company,” Ocko said.
“That massive research advantage leads Element AI to be able to deliver technically advantaged, increasingly cost effective solutions.
Heresy, founded by ex-Stack Overflow Europe MD, wants to help sales teams close with better data
Heresy, founded by ex-Stack Overflow Europe MD, wants to help sales teams close with better data.
Heresy, a startup co-founded by Dimitar Stanimiroff, who was previously MD Europe at Stack Overflow, is a new sales tool designed to increase collaboration between sales team members, and help them make better data-driven decisions, collectively and individually, and ultimately close more sales.
The Software-as-a-Service isn’t a CRM replacement as such — in fact, it painstakingly syncs with Salesforce — but, Stanimiroff tells me, takes its inspiration from agile software development with a front end that includes a simple to use Kanban board (similar to something like Trello) for inputting data and tracking where each potential sale is in the sales pipeline.
Under the hood, data entered by individual sales people is then crunched and analysed to let sales teams and their managers know how likely they are to close a particular deal or meet a sales target overall.
This leads to a CRM either not being used or being filled with inaccurate or so-called “dirty data”.
“As a salesperson, you can do all the usual stuff you’d expect i.e. manage pipeline stages, set reminders for follow ups, track emails/notes, etc.
but everything happens within a couple of clicks or simple drag and drop,” says Stanimiroff.
The second aspect, and key to Stanimiroff’s longer term vision, is the way data is aggregated and shared with managers and, optionally, the rest of the sales team.
This includes what the Heresy CEO calls “one burndown to rule them all,” described as a single view of the team burndown so that everyone knows how the entire team is performing and where they are likely to end the month based on forecasted deals.
“Problems can be identified earlier, allowing the team to course-correct before it’s too late,” he says.