企业通讯工具Eko获570万美元A轮融资，近期欲进军中国市场当Slack被人们广泛关注时，依然有很多人在使用着其他企业通讯工具。
Eko，这众多工具中的一款，在今天透露他们已获得570万美元的A轮融资，由中国的戈壁投资（Gobi Partners）领投。融资将用于新用户的拓展。
在16个月前Eko完成了一轮由500 Startups领投的种子轮融资。之前的投资者在A轮融资中再次参投。
Eko的创始人兼CEO Korawad Chearavanont说道：“Slack注重的是那些雇员人数在50以下的公司，我们针对的却是更大型的公司。带给我们回报最大的一个客户拥有近15万名雇员。这类公司和小型企业解决问题的方式是不一样的，而我们就致力于解决这类难题。”尽管Eko的目标客户是大型公司，它的App还是本着“移动优先”的原则，并且有着和即时通讯应用WhatsApp相似的界面设计。
Eko的下一个目标是中国市场。Korawad声称他们在中国已经引起了一些关注。的确，Eko的很大部分利润来源于中国。受此激励，他们计划在接下来的几个月里在北京开设分部。
Korawad说，如果进军中国市场，他们预备和诸如政府一类的机构进行合作。但是具体的合作对象和合作方式还未公布。中国的创业公司很多也有自己的职场聊天工具，脉脉是使用最广的一个。脉脉在去年曾获得2000万美元的B轮融资。
Korawad认为他们取胜脉脉的法宝就是——同大型公司进行紧密合作。“我们将会以一种非传统且盛大的方式在中国亮相。我们的首要任务是发展平台，其次才是推广品牌。”
不论Eko会选择怎样的进军方式，至少它已经有了一个紧密的中国盟友——戈壁投资。
Workplace chat app Eko gets $5.7M series A funding to make teams productive, quit Slacking
While Slack gets all the headlines, most people around the world are using one of dozens of other workplace messaging apps. One of those apps, Eko, today revealed that it has secured US$5.7 million in series A funding to help it pick up new users. The investment in the Thai-American startup was led by China-based Gobi Partners.
It comes 16 months after the Eko team nabbed seed funding led by 500 Startups. Earlier backers also contributed to the series A round.
Teen entrepreneur
“Whereas Slack is very strong for companies with under 50 employees, our product is not as strong for that segment,” says Korawad Chearavanont, the 20-year-old founder and CEO of Eko. “Our product only begins to truly add value to bigger companies. Our biggest revenue-generating customer has approximately 150,000 employees, for example.”
“They have a very different set of problems from small businesses, and we work to resolve those features,” he adds.
Even though Eko is going for larger firms, the app has the mobile-first mentality and the WhatsApp-esque interface of the new wave of business chat apps that are toppling the old dinosaurs like Yammer – apps like Slack, HipChat, Flowdock, Convo, Cotap, Pie, and Fleep.
Korawad says Eko works a bit differently from some of its rivals by having a “high touch” relationship with some corporate clients that extends to them getting custom versions of the Eko app – not the app available for download on Google Play or Apple’s App Store. “I can’t yet disclose certain customers, due to the stage of launch, but I can say a few top 10 ASEAN banks are paying customers and they have a very specific set of security and regulation needs which we can fulfill, whereas Slack cannot,” he explains.
The startup is keeping the number of active users under its hat.
Korawad is the son of billionaire telco tycoon Suphachai Chearavanont, the president and CEO of True – and he’s the grandson of Dhanin Chearavanont, the wealthiest man in Southeast Asia with a net worth of over US$14 billion. Eko was started up from Korawad’s New Jersey boarding school dorm room when he was 17. The main product office remains in New York, and the startup has opened up a business office in Bangkok.
Charging into China
The next step for the Eko team is China, where Korawad claims the app already has some traction. Indeed, most of Eko’s revenue is generated in China. Inspired by that, the startup plans to open an office in Beijing within the next few months.
He says the app has grown “organically through word of mouth from execs in current clients” in China. It’s also taking a tailor-made approach for some major clients in the country.
“Our full launch in China was not intended or planned until much later. Our traction is different from the traditional early traction many startups may get. In China, we work with entities associated with the government,” Korawad says, but further details on who or how are kept under wraps.
Chinese startups are working on enterprise chat apps of their own – most noticeably Maimai, which this time last year got US$20 million in series B funding.
Korawad sees Eko standing out from Maimai just as it does from Slack – by working closely with some of the huge companies that use it. And he hints at more to come, propelled by this growth in China. “We will enter [China] in an unconventional and big way, which, when we do, you may not recognize us. Our priority is to grow our platform – growing our brand is secondary. Our long term vision is not to be an enterprise messaging app, but rather to be a mobile enterprise platform.”
Whatever form that takes, the startup has a China ally in its newest investor.
Source:Techinasia
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2015年08月27日
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招聘软件Greenhouse获3500万美元C轮融资
这轮融资由 Thrive Capital 领投。这笔资金将为Greenhouse 走向全球市场提供动力，并为 Greenhouse 继续完善其软件提供资金支持。
Greenhouse 是招聘领域的 一家 SaaS 软件服务商，它通过定位、考核以及评估人才等为企业提供专业的招聘服务。在寻找应聘者环节，Greenhouse会将企业所有应聘者的来源（包括来自于招聘网站，猎头的推荐、社交媒体等等）汇总在一个招聘仪表盘里（dashboard），接着该软件会按照职位要求对应聘者进行A/B测试并实时提醒应聘者相关的岗位信息。在面试环节，Greenhouse会帮助雇主拟好相关面试问题并收集应聘者回答，使企业更加方便进行比较和选择。
融资历史：
2013年进行过一轮270万美元的融资。
2014年8月获得了总值750万美元的A轮融资，领投方为Facebook前Facebook前副总裁卡马斯·帕里哈毕提亚（Chamath Palihapitiya）创办的风投基金Social+CapitalPartnership。
2015年3月获 B 轮 1360 万美元融资。此轮由 Benchmark、TheSocia+Capital Partnership 和 Felecis Ventures 共同完成。
Hiring Software Juggernaut Greenhouse Swallows $35M Series C
“We’re not trying to be the all-singing, all-dancing HR system. I don’t know how to be kickass at payroll” says Greenhouse CEO Daniel Chait. But what his startup is kicking ass at is hiring software. It now has over 800 customers including Slack and Pinterest, almost double the 450 it had when it announced its $13.9 million Series B in March.
That progress, plus dreams of international expansion and selling to even bigger corporations, has won Greenhouse another round that brings it to about $60 million in funding. The $35 million Series C led by Thrive Capital will give Greenhouse fuel to grow abroad and refine its software for larger clients. It’s not a unicorn yet, but will be soon at this rate.
The Greenhouse product fertilizes a company’s recruiting and hiring efforts. It compiles sources of job candidates such as job boards and referrals in a hiring dashboard where companies can A/B test job listings and remind employees about openings to be filled. Then during the interviews it helps hirers coordinate, Greenhouse structures the questions asked and answers received so they’re easily comparable. It all makes going from empty desk to strong hire quicker and cheaper.
Greenhouse’s revenue is set to quadruple over the course of 2015 and headcount is swelling as employees pile onto the rocket ship. But Chait’s top concern is keeping his human resources company human.
Staying personal is easy when the whole company fits around a few desks, but now Greenhouse has 125 employees. “You have a culture, but it’s very implicit, based on the founding team. As you grow, in order to sustain that culture you have to make it more explicit, talk about it, hire based on it.”“We try to act like real people” he tells me. “There’s a tendency of a lot of people where when you show up at work, you put on your worker personality and leave your real personality at home. I don’t think that does anyone justice. If you hire great people, they you should let them be themselves.”
Chait tells me payroll, hiring, and other HR tools all used to be sold in “one big monolithic system from a vendor that did everything.” Think Oracle’s omni-tool Taleo. “I want to make the case to the customer that you can be 10X better at this stuff” by using dedicated software that does a smaller set of things.
At least Chait won’t have to worry about funding for a while, since the Series C brings in more than all its previous rounds combined. He says he chose Thrive Capital because “they’re very smart, very hands-on, very involved. They’re not some corner office banker looking at a spreadsheet.”
Greenhouse has only 10% of its business overseas right now, so the funding will partially go towards more international sales offices and staff. It will also go to development of better infrastructure and compliance so Greenhouse’s software can serve even larger massive clients. There’s a few secret R&D projects in the works too.
Meanwhile, Greenhouse is hoping to keep its focus on functionality while beautifying the interface. When asked about mobile-first hiring startup Lever, Chait admitted its platform is “better looking than ours, it’s pretty.” But he stressed that hiring and setting up interviews is inherently complicated, and warned against over-simplifying it.
“When you start out, you gin yourself up to this idea that there’s this big opportunity but you can only picture so many steps ahead,” Chait says with a tinge of nostalgia for quieter days. “At this point, it’s a really tangible set of problems that we’re trying to solve. The imagination is already there.” While others sing and dance, it’s time for Greenhouse to execute.
投融资
2015年08月26日
投融资
数据可视化服务BlueData完成2000万美元C轮融资，Intel领投
数据可视化服务 BlueData 完成 2000 万美元 C 轮融资，Intel 领投 本轮投资由 Intel 领投，Intel 高级副总裁 Doug Fisher 加入 BlueData 董事会。
同时 Intel 与 BlueData 宣布达成战略合作。Amplify Partners, Atlantic Bridge, Ignition Partners 和一家匿名的战略投资者也参与了投资。
BlueData 由两位VMware校友创办，帮助客户将大数据集群进行可视化处理，基于 Hadoop 或是 Spark 为用户提供服务。最近 BlueData 基于 OpenStack 开发了一个使用KVM虚拟机的Epic平台，将Hadoop中各种不同的系统存储的各种不同格式的数据进行统一处理。
本文编译自：TC
Big Data Vendor BlueData Announces $20M Round And Intel Partnership
BlueData, a company that helps customers generate virtualized big data clusters, announced a $20 million Series C round and a partnership with Intel today.
Intel Capital led the round. Also participating were Amplify Partners, Atlantic Bridge, Ignition Partners, as well as a strategic investor who chose to remain anonymous. As part of the deal, Doug Fisher, senior vice president of Intel and general manager of its Software and Services Group, will join BlueData’s board of directors.
BlueData’s founders have their roots in VMware. The goal with BlueData has been to make it as easy to spin up a Hadoop cluster as it is a virtual machine, company founder and CEO Kumar Sreekanti told TechCrunch.
“Enterprises require efficient and agile implementations for their on-premises big data solutions. Speed and innovation are essential in big data analytics, and the infrastructure can’t slow this down.” Sreekanti wrote in a blog post.
The product is essentially Hadoop- or Spark-as-a Service, but instead of living in the cloud, it resides on-premises on customer hardware. It combines the agility, speed and multi-tenancy of the cloud with the performance of running on bare metal in the data center.
What’s more, it works with any version of Hadoop or Apache Spark. The company is also planning on supporting Docker containers in an upcoming release.
The deal with Intel will involve several levels including engineers from both companies working together. BlueData will also have early access to new hardware releases. The idea is that BlueData will work to optimize its products on Intel architecture, particularly Intel Xeon chips.
The two companies will also work together on joint marketing and sales projects, and Intel will provide BlueData with the entree at the large enterprise customers it craves.
The partnership has the potential to be a huge boost to a small company like BlueData, which currently has 35 employees. The agreement is part of Intel’s ongoing effort to support big data companies, and comes on the heels of a similar deal with Cloudera, a BlueData partner, last year.
This isn’t the first time, Intel has shown interest in BlueData. It also contributed to the company’s Series A and B round.
Intel has been spreading the wealth this week. Just yesterday, it announced a big cloud push to go with its big data initiative. As part of that, it invested significant money and resources in Mirantis , an OpenStack company.
Since it launched in 2012 BlueData has raised a fairly modest $39 million across three rounds including today’s announcement — and it wasn’t looking for a big score this time.
“We weren’t looking for a huge amount of money. It’s too early for that,” Sreekanti said.
Sreekanti wouldn’t say exactly how many customers it has, but it lists several on the company website including Comcast, Orange and Symantec.
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2015年08月26日
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Coursera获4950万美元C轮融资，重点拓展中印及拉美市场
在去年引入前耶鲁大学校长Rick Levin担任新 CEO 以后，在线教育巨头Coursera的策略就瞄准了扩张市场。当然，这些扩张离不开资金，现在增援的资金来了，C 轮的第一批 4950 万美元已经完成，预计到今年秋季还会有 1050 万美元到位，从而令本轮融资总额达到 6000 万美元。
成立于 2012年 的 Coursera 是全球最大的 MOOC 提供者之一，目前已经开设了 1100 多门课程，在全球拥有 1500 万的学习者，其中 75%分布在美国以外，其中中国、印度和拉美是其重点海外市场。
此轮融资由 New Enterprise Associates 领投，KPCN、International Finance Corporation、International Finance Corporation 以及 Times Internet Limited 等跟投，此轮融资过后，其融资总额将达月1.35 亿美元。此轮融资所得将用于拉美、中国与印度市场的扩张。
今年4月，从 Rick 在中国密集的行程中可以看出，Coursera 市场扩张的策略将是全球化、职业教育以及本土合作，现在这一策略已经初见成效，就在今年7月，Coursera 中国注册用户数已经突破 100 万，超越印度成为其美国以外的第二大市场。不过值得注意的是 Times Internet Limited 这家拥有印度时报等媒体资产的投资机构的参与，Coursera 也有可能借助它的力量进一步打开印度市场。此外，以巴西为首的拉美市场则是 Coursera 的第四大用户群。这些市场的拓张均离不开资金支持。
此外，Coursera 还将继续加强产品研发，改进学习评估技术以及与学员的互动。同时，进一步探索在线教育的货币化之路。而最近 Coursera 开设了多门付费的职业教育课程已经成为其主要收入来源。
数据分析工具提供商 Datameer 获得 E 轮 4000 万美元融资
本轮融资由 ST Telemedia 领投，Top Tier Capital Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, Redpoint, Next World Capital 和 Software AG 等机构跟投。
Datameer 成立于 2009 年 总部位于旧金山，是一家数据分析工具提供商。利用开源 Hadoop 分布式计算框架，帮助客户分析大型数据。本轮融资将用于全球性的拓展。同时，本轮融资后 ST Telemedia 合伙人 Nikhil Eapen 将加入Datameer 董事会。
Datameer Snags $40M Series E for International Expansion
Datameer, the San Francisco-based data analytics provider, has received a $40 million round of Series E funding to help it expand globally. The company was founded in 2009and uses the open source Hadoop distributed computing framework, meant to help businesses run analytics of large data sets, Datameer says. The Series E round was led by ST Telemedia, along with Top Tier Capital Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, Redpoint, Next World Capital and Software AG. Nikhil Eapen, chief strategy and investment officer of ST Telemedia, is joining Datameer’s board. The company says Eapen has extensive knowledge of communications, media, and technology in Asia.
原文链接：http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2015/08/18/datameer-snags-40m-series-e-for-international-expansion/
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