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Ushur, which aims to automate aspects of the customer experience, raises $50M

TechCrunch

Bringing the startup’s total raised to $92 million, the funds will be put toward expanding Ushur’s product portfolio, developing new AI innovations and moving into new regions and industry verticals, according to CEO Simha Sadasiva. “For example, in the insurance industry, ACORD forms are a standard. Fair question.

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The Rising Stakes in SaaS

Tomasz Tunguz

Over that 20 year period, annual SaaS investment has increased 20x, peaking in 2014 at $7B. Incumbent client/server technologies have lost their market dominance to new incumbents. Feature optimization - develop a product with 20% of the features but 80% of the value, and use a simplified product to challenge the competition.

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How W4 plans to monetize the Godot game engine using Red Hat’s open-source playbook

TechCrunch

Godot, for the uninitiated, is a cross-platform game engine first released under an open source license back in 2014, though its initial development pre-dates that by several years. It’s basically a software framework that developers can use and reuse without having to redesign the wheel with each new game they create.

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Kuda raises $25M more led by Valar to become the neobank for ‘every African on the planet’

TechCrunch

Challenger banks continue to make significant advances in attracting customers away from the big incumbents by providing more modern, user-friendly tools to manage their money. These will typically be at incumbent banks, but they do not offer the same ranges of services to customers. Which neobanks will rise or fall?

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CommerceIQ gets its horn as capital continues to flow into e-commerce infrastructure startups

TechCrunch

When much of the shopping shifted online during the global pandemic, startups developing software and other products to aid the transition began to garner attention from venture capital firms. The CEO is Guru Hariharan, who you might remember from retail analytics company Boomerang Commerce , a Startup Battlefield finalist in 2014.

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Citi backs Crowdz, a Pipe competitor that just raised $10M for its blockchain-powered invoice financing marketplace

TechCrunch

Payson Johnston and Steven Lee started Crowdz in 2014 after working as B2B supply-chain senior managers for global processes at Cisco. We quickly found that most incumbents focusing solely on the financing of SaaS receivables lacked reliable data and market traction to sufficiently validate their business models,” Chupryna said.

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Quickly Unpacking Microsoft’s Acquisition Of GitHub

Haystack

After being installed in 2014 as Microsoft’s new CEO, Nadella has turned around the Seattle ocean liner on a new course after the Ballmer regime. Let’s quickly unpack what makes the deal interesting: 1/ “Developers, Developers, Developers!” Satya strikes again. And yesterday, another feather in the cap — GitHub.