Category: Frontpage

India’s Razorpay becomes unicorn after new $100 million funding round

Posted on by Aneel Ranadive

Bangalore-headquartered Razorpay,  one of the handful of Indian fintech startups that has demonstrated accelerated growth in recent years, has joined the coveted unicorn club after raising $100 million in a new financing round, the payments processing startup said on Monday.

The new financing round, a Series D, was co-led by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC  and Sequoia India, the six-year-old Indian startup said. The new round valued the startup at “a little more than $1 billion,” co-founder and chief executive Harshil Mathur told TechCrunch in an interview.

Rappi raises over US$300 million

Posted on by Aneel Ranadive

It’s official: Rappi is raising big funds. We’d previously reported that the Colombian unicorn had rallied US$155.8 million as per a recent SEC filing. But the startup, via press release confirmed today (24) that it raised more than US$300 million.

It’s worth pointing out that within the aforementioned SEC document, the startup is aiming for US$350 million.

“We’re happy to be working with this team of investors who trust our growth model and believe in our region and the role we have to play in promoting local commerce and actively contributing to the region’s economic recovery. This round of investments will allow us to fund the business, our partners, and the future,” said Rappi in a statement.

Lambda School raises $74M for its virtual coding school where you pay tuition only after you get a job

Posted on by Aneel Ranadive

In the world of technology, online learning has been one of the bigger beneficiaries of the last several months, with people staying home and away from their normal routines because of the coronavirus pandemic and using that time to expand their knowledge, or more critically, figure out what to do next if they want to change careers, or have found themselves without a job.

Data science startup Pachyderm, which just raised $16 million, says remote work has been ‘a massive benefit’ to its business

Posted on by Aneel Ranadive

When the data science platform Pachyderm first launched in 2014, open source project Hadoop was the only major big data player on the market (the startup’s name is actually an early jab at Hadoop, which has an elephant in its logo).

Pachyderm’s business didn’t really take off until 2017, says cofounder Joey Zwicker, when the demand for data science skyrocketed. From there, the startup started attracting the attention of venture capitalists and large business customers alike.

Rippling nabs $145M at a $1.35B valuation to build out its all-in-one platform for employee data

Posted on by Aneel Ranadive

Big news today in the world of enterprise IT startups. Rippling, the startup founded by Parker Conrad to take on the ambitious challenge of building a platform to manage all aspects of employee data, from payroll and benefits through to device management, has closed $145 million in funding — a monster Series B that catapults the company to a valuation of $1.35 billion.

Parker Conrad, the CEO who co-founded the company with Prasanna Sankar (the CTO), said in an interview that the plan will be to use the money to continue its own in-house product development (that is, bringing more tools into the Rippling mix organically, not by way of acquisition) but also to have it just in case, given everything else going on at the moment.

Lattice, a people management platform, picks up $45M at a $400M valuation

Posted on by Aneel Ranadive

Working these days is not what it used to be. To enforce social distancing and slow the spread of the COVID-19 health pandemic, many of us have decamped from our offices to our homes, we only connect with colleagues and others virtually, and it’s all too easy to lose sight of our focus and strategy in the midst of it all.

But in the grand tradition of enterprise IT, that creates an opportunity, and today, a startup called Lattice, whose platform helps track, reward and set goal achievement in the workplace, has closed a round of $45 million to help address some of those issues.