When Slack CEO Denise Dresser was handed the reins last November, she was the third CEO in less than a year at the enterprise communications company.
The SaaS Stage lineup, including our discussion with Denise Dresser, is taking place on Oct 29th – learn more about the event here.
About TechCrunch Disrupt 2024TechCrunch Disrupt is where you’ll find innovation for every stage of your startup journey.
Over 10,000 startup leaders will be attending this year’s event on October 28-30 in San Francisco.
We can’t wait to hear from Denise Dresser and more SaaS leaders at this year’s show.
For Informatica investors, it was the opposite: The price was too low to warrant selling — they wanted more, more, more — and their stock also dropped, down a similar amount over the same period.
The biggest by far of that bunch was the $28 billion deal to buy Slack at the end of 2020.
Informatica is also far smaller than Salesforce, making its potential revenue bump to Marc Benioff’s company modest.
The ace up Informatica’s sleeve is that while its total revenue growth is slow, one important segment of its revenues is expanding quickly.
If we were to compare Informatica cloud net-new ARR that it expects this year instead, the percentage becomes even smaller.
Like many immigrants, the New York City skyline was one of the first sights young brothers Edi and Etrit Demaj took in when they arrived in the U.S. over 20 years ago.
“The first building that we saw was the Empire State Building,” Etrit recalls.
The Demaj family soon settled in Detroit, where the brothers completed their education and started various companies, including their latest, Kode Labs, which integrates and automates various systems in commercial buildings — including the Empire State Building.
When the Demaj brothers founded Kode in 2017, they sought to bring building management into the cloud era.
The brothers liken it to an OS that integrates building systems like a computer OS integrates various circuit boards.
Last year, Salesforce, the company best known for its cloud sales support software (and Slack), spearheaded a project called ProGen to design proteins using generative AI.
“Many drugs — enzymes and antibodies, for example — consist of proteins,” Madani said.
Fed into a generative AI model, data about proteins can be used to predict entirely new proteins with novel functions.
Other companies and research groups have demonstrated viable ways in which generative AI can be used to predict proteins.
And DeepMind, Google’s AI research lab, has a system called AlphaFold that predicts complete protein structures, achieving speed and accuracy far surpassing older, less complex algorithmic methods.
Zscaler, a cloud security company with headquarters in San Jose, California, has acquired cybersecurity startup Avalor 26 months after its founding, reportedly for $310 million in cash and equity.
But what sets Avalor apart is the ability to handle data from virtually any source in any format, and its unique set of vulnerability risk management and prioritization tools.
Prior to the Zscaler acquisition, Avalor managed to secure $30 million from investors including TCV, Salesforce Ventures, Jibe Ventures and Cyberstarts.
And Raz sees Zscaler taking the business — and its ~80-person team spread across the U.S. and Israel — further.
As Crunchbase’s Chris Metinko noted earlier today, Zscaler’s acquisition — along with others in the cybersecurity space — could help spark activity in a slow-to-stagnant cyber M&A market.
Slack’s new CEO looks to bring stability after a turbulent period Three chief executives in one year will do thatIt’s not often you see an established company burn through three CEOs in less than a year.
But through circumstances beyond its control, that’s what has happened at Slack, the company Salesforce acquired in 2020 for $28 billion.
Jones herself had replaced company co-founder Stewart Butterfield when he announced that he was leaving at the end of 2022.
“And then you think about Salesforce having this incredible set of customer data, some of the world’s most valued data.
Even though Harris brings a long history of building Salesforce, Slack is losing a person who has a deep understanding of Slack’s technical underpinnings.
Salesforce has announced plans to acquire Spiff, a platform that automates commission management for sales teams.
The deal also constitutes the latest in a line of ecosystem companies that Salesforce has eventually brought in-house.
Back in September Salesforce acquired Airkit, a low-code platform for building AI customer service agents.
And similar to Spiff, Airkit was also available on AppExchange.
So it’s clear that Salesforce continues to see tried-and-tested ecosystem companies as a safe bet for its M&A endeavors, with “low-code” playing a key factor too.
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