That’s where customer success software comes into play.
Two customer success companies, Totango and Catalyst, on Wednesday announced they are merging in an effort to take on the market leader, Gainsight.
“Everyone feels very excited about the potential of these two companies,” Catalyst CEO and co-founder Edward Chiu told TechCrunch.
“The deep customer success expertise and enterprise capabilities of Totango combined with the intuitive design and forward-thinking vision of Catalyst create a powerhouse to redefine customer success and how businesses maximize customer lifetime value.”Jessica Lin, co-founder and general partner at Work-Bench, whose firm invested in Catalyst early on, sees a similar opportunity.
“Our goal is for this combined entity to own the customer success market and have an even bigger outcome than Gainsight (which exited in late 2020 for $1.1 billion).
Crypto fund Asymmetric Financial is creating its Bitcoin DeFi Venture Fund I to focus on investing in the blockchain’s nascent space with a target raise of $21 million.
The fund will be spearheaded by general partner Dan Held, former director of growth at Kraken and long-time Bitcoiner.
Many Bitcoin-focused VCs ignore DeFi because it’s speculative, and broader crypto VCs see it as a “dead boomer rock,” he added.
Much of this activity has centered on the Ethereum blockchain, but Held believes Bitcoin’s blockchain has tons of future potential as an ecosystem.
“It will be a Bitcoin DeFi renaissance.”“Bitcoin is worth more than every other crypto asset combined,” Held added.
“Brand anchors” to gated areas like reward programs are something that companies will expand upon in 2024, he said.
“I think this year we’re going to see a lot of community-based brand building,” he shared on TechCrunch’s Chain Reaction podcast.
Starbucks launched Starbucks Odyssey in 2022 as its initial foray into the web3 world.
The experience combined the company’s Starbucks Reward loyalty program with NFTs to enhance customer experiences, TechCrunch previously reported.
This never would have happened if not for web3.”The loyalty program has a five-tiered system with over 58,000 active participants at least on level one, Kaczynski said.
A growing roster of vertical AI startups is emerging in Southeast Asia to serve sectors ranging from seafood to finance.
Within verticalized AI, different trends are emerging in each country.
Since funding structures are different in Southeast Asia than the rest of the world, BorderDollar used their own training data to build a credit scoring system.
Building a vertical AI startup comes with its own challenges.
But once a vertical AI startup comes together, Salovaara says they can build a very deep competitive moat.
Lucid Motors plans to build just 9,000 electric vehicles in 2024, only 500 to 1,000 more than it made in 2023, as it struggles with demand for its luxury sedans.
And it’s a sign of the brutal reality Lucid now faces: that it’s still scrambling to find buyers and losing money on every EV it builds.
The modest projection comes a few days after the company slashed the prices of its Air sedan by $8,000.
The Gravity is one of the reasons Lucid originally forecasted being able to make and ship 90,000 vehicles in a few short years.
In fact, in the presentation Lucid used to promote its 2021 merger with a special purpose acquisition company, it predicted the Gravity would outsell the Air sedan in 2024.
This YC alum just raised $31M to build the ‘TurboTax for construction permitting’ Kleiner Perkins led the Series A, which came just over a year after seed roundAnyone who has ever tried to build or renovate a house knows the pain of obtaining construction permits.
It’s no surprise then that the startup world has seen a flurry of startups focused on streamlining the permitting process.
Today the company is announcing it has raised $31 million in Series A funding led by Kleiner Perkins, TechCrunch has learned exclusively.
More affordable housingPermitFlow primarily works with general contractors to help make the permitting process less painful.
“A municipality today will have a digital permitting process.
So it is with Nuview, a startup aiming to map the world from space using lidar, who announced today that its acquisition of analytics platform Astraea.
In a recent interview, Nuview CEO Clint Graumann also declined to specify how many of Astraea’s employee’s would be joining the company.
Nuview is relatively young to be executing on an acquisition; Graumann founded the company in January 2022, and has raised at least $15 million to date.
“I’ve always seen Earth observation companies who try to build every capability from the ground up, struggle,” he said.
Spoc”, though Graumann declined to specify whether Nuview had booked a firm launch date for that demonstration mission.
In a role reversal, Xalts, a Singapore fintech startup founded 18 months ago, has acquired Contour Network, a digital trade platform set up by eight major banks including HSBC, Standard Chartered and BNP.
Backed by Accel and Citi Ventures, Xalts enables financial institutions to build and manage blockchain-based apps.
The startup plans to turn Contour into a rail connecting banks, corporations and other institutions, and integrate it with Xalts’ platform.
Kaur says this will enable Xalts’ clients to not only build apps, but also connect with each other in a secure and compliant way.
It will focus first on enabling banks and logistics companies to offer embedded trade and supply chain apps on a single platform to their customers.
Nvidia currently dominates the AI chip market with its GPU chips.
OpenAI chief Sam Altman is reportedly also in talks with investors in the United Arab Emirates to raise an eye-watering $5 trillion to $7 trillion for a new AI chip project.
Altman has reportedly met with a number of potential investors, chip industry experts and others across the globe, including SoftBank’s Son, for the new AI chip initiative.
Shift focus (from Alibaba) to AIA new chip project would be line with the company’s new focus on AI.
Shares of SoftBank closed 2.8% higher on Monday after Son’s AI chip project news broke on Saturday.
That’s the driving idea behind Nile, a startup that aims to create this data system with serverless Postgres at its core.
This could be authentication, billing, and so on.”Unsurprisingly, that’s exactly the problem Nile tries to solve.
The idea here is that every SaaS company has a data layer at its core and since we are talking about SaaS companies, they all have to solve for multi-tenancy in some form or another, no matter whether they are in the B2B or B2C space.
Traditionally, the team argued, solving problems around data and database management was always an application problem rather than a database problem.
Nile is turning this on its head by making multi-tenancy a core feature of its Postgres solution and by separating the data layer from the compute layer.
