Month: June 2018

San Jose-based Cohesity has closed an oversubscribed $250M Series D funding round led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund, bringing its total raised to date to $410M. The enterprise software company offers a hyperconverged data platform for storing and managing all the secondary data created outside of production apps.

In a press release today it notes this is only the second time SoftBank’s gigantic Vision Fund has invested in an enterprise software company. The fund, which is almost $100BN in size — without factoring in all the planned sequels, also led an investment in enterprise messaging company Slack back in September 2017 (also a $250M round).

“Cohesity pioneered hyperconverged secondary storage as a first stepping stone on the path to a much larger transformation of enterprise infrastructure spanning public and private clouds. We believe that Cohesity’s web-scale Google-like approach, cloud-native architecture, and incredible simplicity is changing the business of IT in a fundamental way,” said Deep Nishar, senior managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, in a supporting statement.

Also participating in the financing are Cohesity’s existing strategic investors Cisco Investments, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital, along with early investor Sequoia Capital and others.

The company says the investment will be put towards “large-scale global expansion” by selling more enterprises on the claimed cost and operational savings from consolidating multiple separate point solutions onto its hyperconverged platform. On the customer acquisition front it flags up support from its strategic investors, Cisco and HPE, to help it reach more enterprises.

Cohesity says it’s onboarded more than 200 new enterprise customers in the last two quarters — including Air Bud Entertainment, AutoNation, BC Oil and Gas Commission, Bungie, Harris Teeter, Hyatt, Kelly Services, LendingClub, Piedmont Healthcare, Schneider Electric, the San Francisco Giants, TCF Bank, the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Air Force, and WestLotto — and says annual revenues grew 600% between 2016 and 2017.

In another supporting statement, CEO and founder Mohit Aron, added: “My vision has always been to provide enterprises with cloud-like simplicity for their many fragmented applications and data — backup, test and development, analytics, and more.

“Cohesity has built significant momentum and market share during the last 12 months and we are just getting started.”

from TechCrunch

A month after it filed for a much-anticipated Hong Kong IPO, Xiaomi has revealed a little more financial information after a monster 621-page document disclosed a $1.1 billion (seven billion RMB) loss for the first quarter of the year.

The IPO, which could raise up to $10 billion value Xiaomi at high as $100 billion, is set to be the largest IPO raise since Alibaba went public in the U.S. in 2014. That prospect got a boost with a dose of positive financial growth despite a loss incurred by one-off payments.

The document, which was filed was an application to issue a CDRs as part of a dual-listing that would include Mainland China, showed that Xiaomi’s revenue for the quarter jumped to 34 billion RMB, or $5.3 billion. That’s compared to 114.6 billion RMB ($17.9 billion) in total sales for all of last year, according to digging from TechCrunch partner site Technode.

While Xiaomi posted a loss for the quarter, the firm actually posted a 1.038 billion RMB ($162 million) profit for the period when one-time items are excluded. Xiaomi previously registered a 43.9 billion RMB ($6.9 billion) loss in 2017 on account of issuing preferred shares to investors (54 billion RMB) but it did post a slim profit in 2016.

The company is ranked fourth based on global smartphone shipments, according to analyst firm IDC, and it is one of the few OEMs to buck slowing sales in China.

China is, as you’d expect, the primary revenue market but Xiaomi is increasingly less dependent on its homeland. For 2017 sales, China represented 72 percent, but it had been 94 percent and 87 percent, respectively, in 2015 and 2016. India is Xiaomi’s most successful overseas venture, having built the business to the number one smartphone firm based on market share, and Xiaomi is pledging to double down on other global areas.

Interestingly there’s no mention of expanding phone sales to the U.S., but Xiaomi has pledged to put 30 percent of its IPO towards growing its presence in Southeast Asia, Europe, Russia “other regions.” Currently, it said it sells products in 74 countries, that does include the U.S. where Xiaomi sells accessories and non-phone items.

Despite its design progress, relative age as an eight-year-old company and the fact it is shooting for a $100 billion, Xiaomi left some spectators disappointed when it wheeled out a very iPhone X-looking new device earlier this month. While the company claims the Mi 8 is packed with new technology, it’s hard to look past the fact that a number of its visual designs are identical to Apple’s flagship smartphone. Xiaomi could have made a stronger statement of intent with the launch, but it will hope its financials can do the talking as it moves into the last moments of preparation before its public listing.

from TechCrunch

Those not looking at the Bitcoin markets lately will either gasp or smile. Bitcoin, down from its all time high of around $19,000, is now floating at $6,785 as of this writing. To many this means that either the Bitcoin experiment is over or, to many more, that it has just begun.

There are plenty of folks who will have been hurt by this crash. I was speaking with a Romanian entrepreneur about his friend who bought BTC on a credit card only to find that he is wildly underwater. The volatility is also frightening to folks who might have gotten in on the last run up only to find themselves back at the start. I pity the poor waiter who a friend saw making Bitcoin trades at $18,000 during his shift. I hope he sold.

But there are no signs that the cryptocurrency train is stopping. Startups around the world are all examining – and doing – ICOs. Plenty of early crypto miners and buyers still have enough cash to play around in all sorts of ways. Bitcoin naysayers like R3 are figuring out that bankers didn’t want to hear “blockchain, not bitcoin” after all once they realized that bitcoin, like their beloved equities and commodities, was just another place for them to play.

And people are still active in the market. That’s important. As this Coindesk analysis notes, the markets will be deeply volatile during this stretch and could remain so as risk-taking buyers snap up coin on the downswing.

Don’t believe me? This is the seven day trading volume for almost all of the exchanges.

Ultimately these moves make up one of the most interesting forms of intergenerational and international wealth transfer we’ve ever seen. Whereas this wealth transfer once came in the form of inheritances and joint ventures, cryptocurrencies enable an almost instantaneous partners ship between the old and young and the near and far. It’s a fascinating economic time and I doubt it will let up any time soon.

Sometimes the price goes up, sometimes it goes down. That’s the best advice any smart person can give anyone in any market. However, the signs point less to a flatline and more to a gut-wrenching EKG full of ups and downs. The patient, however, is not dead yet.

from TechCrunch

India is a major part of Google’s global focus. The company launched a new product in India last week as its program to bring free WiFi to the public registered its 400th railway station. Now, the U.S. tech giant is continuing to deepen its focus after CapitalG — its venture arm formerly known as Google Capital — made its first investment in India by backing micro-loan startup Aye Finance.

CapitalG led the $21.5 million Series C round which also included participation from existing investors SAIF Partners and LGT, who were part of a $10.5 million investment in 2016. Since that round, Aye Finance has raised over $30 million via a series of debt investment-based deals, according to data from Crunchbase.

Aye Finance offers micro-loans to small businesses in India that are not on the radar of banks and traditional financing companies, and also don’t qualify for programs run by the likes of Flipkart and Amazon. The firm aims to digitize the market of informal money lending and loan sharking. Its disbursements are typically used as working capital for SMEs.

Over its four years of operations, the startup claims it has payed out more than 60,000 loans. Today, it claims to cover 10 states in India through a network of 72 branches. The firm touts its use of technology, and in particular data, which helps keep operating costs low and efficiency high.

In particular, it targets industry ‘clusters’ — aka industry verticals — which allows it not only to develop more accurate metrics for analyzing the potential of a business than the general criteria that traditional financiers follow, but it also helps generate new leads through word of mouth.

“We have used insightful data models and technology to provide affordable business loans to the financially excluded micro enterprises across India [and] CapitalG’s access to Google expertise in scaling businesses using analytics and technology will strongly supplement our approach. We are at an exciting juncture, where the business model has been proven and is also scaling well,” Sanjay Sharma, Aye Finance founder and managing director, said in a statement.

Google’s previously made its first direct investment in an Indian startup when it backed Dunzo, a startup that operates a concierge app, in December 2017. Now CapitalG is catching up with its first deal on Indian soil.

from TechCrunch