If tech market and Wall Street gyrations continue to make you queasy, you can take comfort in at least one fact: Innovative cloud startups in high-impact categories continue to secure big venture capital funding and financing rounds.
In this report, I’m going to take a quick look at four rounds announced this week: two $100-million-dollar-plus monsters, then two other investment rounds that Acceleration Economy readers need to know about.
The monsters: a $146 million funding round for SingleStore, which makes a unified database and analytics engine, and $200 million in financing for robotic process automation (RPA) software firm Automation Anywhere. These two deals underscore a key point in today’s market: Software that literally runs the business (like SingleStore) or can deliver material impact quickly (like Automation Anywhere and RPA) aren’t having much, if any, trouble winning customers or financial backers.
The other two — Workspan for $30 million and Ecocart for $14.5 million — make software for partner ecosystems and sustainability. Those segments are thriving, too.
SingleStore
This provider of turnkey database and analytics software closed its latest round of funding with a total of $146 million; the investment round is led by Goldman Sachs and adding Prosperity7 Ventures as a new investor.
SingleStoreDB is positioned as a platform that empowers businesses to deliver real-time experiences by unifying transactions and analytics. The company says today’s businesses need real-time data and immediate insights to make informed decisions for a competitive edge.
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The company has nearly doubled employee headcount in the past 12 months, and has expanded with offices in Ireland, Singapore, and Australia. The newest funding round brings total investments in the company, based in San Francisco, to well over $400 million.
Automation Anywhere
Robotic process automation software developer Automation Anywhere secured $200 million in financing from Silicon Valley Bank, SVB Capital, and Hercules Capital, Inc.
Company officials said that revenue growth currently exceeds 50 percent, with more than 80 percent of its business being in the cloud. The financing is intended to provide operational and strategic capital for the next several years; officials predicted this $200 million in financing will see the company to profitability.
The company says customers have run 50 million automations in 2022, and that its largest customers are deploying thousands of bots across their organization.
One point of comparison: Publicly held UiPath, which has one customer, EY, with 125,000 users of bots. UiPath has said most new customers are adopting its platform in the cloud, but it also has a significant installed base of on-premises users.
Workspan
Workspan was founded to make partnerships an engine for growth and to build a platform that connects partners and standardizes data exchange between them.
Workspan raised $30 million in a new funding round led by Ganesh Bell, managing director at Insight Partners, with participation from Mayfield and M12, Microsoft’s venture fund. The company is based in Foster City, Calif.
Founded in 2014, the company says its partner network empowers companies to scale co-sell revenue growth with its partner ecosystem — including those for Microsoft, SAP, and more. It manages more than 9,000 ecosystem partnering companies, $50 billion of co-sell pipeline, and $1 billion in incentive funds. The company’s software is used to help customers co-sell, co-innovate, co-market, and co-invest to align incentives between partners.
Ecocart
Ecocart participated in our Cloud Wars Expo Innovation Path startup competition in June.
The company’s software lets e-retail customers add a sustainability option to their e-commerce transactions. For a fee, an e-retail customer can make their transactions carbon-neutral. Thousands of retailers are offering the service.
Ecocart, based in San Francisco, raised $14.5 million in financing, led by Fifth Wall.
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