Mind The Gap By Freshchat

Groupon co-founder Eric Lefkofsky just raised another $200 million for his newest company, Tempus Tempus has built a platform to collect, structure and analyze the clinical data that’s often unorganized in electronic medical record systems. The company also generates genomic data by sequencing patient DNA and other information in its lab. When serial entrepreneur Eric Lefkofsky grows a company, he puts the pedal to the metal. When in 2011 his last company, the Chicago-based coupons site Groupon, raised $950 million from investors, it was the largest amount raised by a startup ever. It was just over three years old at the time, and it went public later that same year. Lefkofsky seems to be stealing a page from the same playbook for his newest company, Tempus. The Chicago-based genomic testing and data analysis company was founded a little more than three years ago, yet it has already hired nearly 700 employees and raised more than $500 million — including a new $200 million round that values the company at $

This week, seven startups raised $23.37 Mn funding and two startup acquisitions took place in India. Good times! Let’s start with the biggest funding of last week, raised by Gurugram-based used car marketplace Spinny. It raised $13.2 Mn in Series A funding round led by Accel and SAIF Partners. Existing investors such as Blume Ventures and Simile Ventures had also participated in the round. The fresh funds will be used to strengthen its team across functions, improving inventory assortment and expanding the coverage and presence to newer locations. Noida-based edtech startup XploraBox raised $1 Mn in a Pre Series A funding round from Green Shoots Capital, Sucseed Ventures, JITO Angel Network, SWAN Angel Network and other angel investors including IIM alumni. Existing investor Metaform Ventures, USA, also participated in this round. The funds will be used to scale up in India, US and GCC countries. Bengaluru-based end-to-end home design and decor service provider Livspace raised an undisclosed amount from IKEA

This podcast will provide a 5 minute highlight reel of all that happened in the startup ecosystem last week. So let’s begin with the news around funding. So, guess what? This week’s startup funding scene has been quite great. We are talking about a total of 330 funding rounds, $6.7 billion total funding, 99 acquisitions recorded, and a transaction of a total acquisition amount of $7.3 billion. That being said, let’s dive right into the highlights. Gokada a Nigeria based ride-hailing startup raises $5.3M In many large cities across Africa, motorcycle taxis are the most common mode of shared transport. That includes Lagos, Nigeria, where ride-hail startup Gokada has raised a $5.3 million Series A round to grow its two-wheel transit business. Gokada has trained and on-boarded more than 1,000 motorcycles and their pilots on its app that connects commuters to moto-taxis and the company’s signature green, DOT– approved helmets. The startup has completed nearly 1 million rides since it was co-founded in 2018 by Fahi

Dennis Brown is a podcaster, an author and a serial entrepreneur who is a LinkedIn evangelist and consultant. Being big fans of his podcast Growth experts, we decided to bring him over to chat about one thing he’s truly passionate about - growth using LinkedIn. In this podcast, we have documented our chat with Dennis Brown on LinkedIn Marketing. LinkedIn is used more than a plain networking site. Many brands and individuals use LinkedIn for lead generation, engagement, branding and so on. It’s a complete marketing genie if you get an effective hang of the platform and learn to use it optimally. After all, users spend an average of 17 minutes only on LinkedIn daily. Dennis tells us how to best leverage LinkedIn to grow your brand presence and succeed in your marketing efforts. Listener notes 6.36 - Dennis' story from detesting social media to becoming a LinkedIn consultant 13.55 - Creating a solid LinkedIn Profile - A picture is worth a thousand words 20.37 - Improvement on LinkedIn 22.22 - Abishek & Den

Last week, nine startups raised $205.39 Mn funding and one startup acquisition took place in the Indian startup ecosystem. (This funding report is based on startups that disclosed funding amount.) The largest funding round was raised by Gurugram-based online grocery startup Grofers. It raised a $200 Mn in Series F round led by SoftBank Vision Fund. The company also raised capital from existing investors Tiger Global and Sequoia Capital as well as new investor KTB. Grofers is looking to utilise the funding to expand into new markets, build out its supply chain, improve warehousing infrastructure and expand its private label portfolio. Mumbai-based fashion retail startup Disrupt raised an undisclosed amount in Pre-Series A funding from Fynd cofounders Harsh Shah and Farooq Adam Anil Gelra and Mumbai-based VC firm First Cheque. The funds will be used to further invest in strategic collaborations, research and development, executive appointments, talent acquisition and offline retail expansion. Further, the funds

This week’s startup scene was definitely in its top shape. We are talking about a total of 397 funding rounds that’s hundred more than last week, $31.2 billion total funding which is almost 5 times last week, 153 acquisitions recorded, and a transaction of a total acquisition amount of $9.3 billion. That being said, let’s dive right into the highlights. Feather, a New York-based company that offers contemporary, higher-end furniture on a subscription basis raised $12.5 million in a Series A round led by Spark Capital. Prior seed investors Fuel Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, PJC, Kleiner Perkins, and Y Combinator followed on in the round, according to Crunchbase. Algorithmia raised $25 million in Series B funding led by Norwest Venture Partners. Algorithmia, based in Seattle, is building infrastructure for the final step of the machine learning workflow: integrating a predictive model into a production code environment. Basically, what the company calls its “AI Layer” is a software environment that automatic

This week Bengaluru-based hyperlocal grocery startup, BigBasket, finally closed its $150 Mn Series F funding round. With the latest round, the company has comfortably landed on the unicorn club.The company will use the funds towards growth through further penetration into existing markets with more investments in the first mile, scaling-up of its supply chain and for developing new reseller channels. Further, Mukesh Bansal and Ankit Nagori-led fitness startup Cure.fit raised $75 Mn from Piramal Group’s Anand Piramal, Accel Growth, Kalaari Capital, IDG Ventures India. Cure.fit uses an online-offline model to offer physical fitness (Cult.fit), mental fitness (Mind.fit), nutrition (Eat.fit), with a primary care vertical (Care.fit) coming soon. Gurugram-based digital nutrition platform HealthKart raised $25 Mn from Sofina in a fresh round of financing. The company said it would use the funds to further expand its store network, and plans to use data science and artificial intelligence (AI) to improve its customer

What's with Uber's IPO scene? Let's dive into fundings - Recruiting company humanpredictions landed $1.16 million from investors. The round was led by Network Ventures. The company wants to help hiring managers fill their shortages of tech roles, from software engineers to data scientists. The company claims it wants to discover “hidden tech talent outside of LinkedIn” by using data and machine learning. Real estate startup Reali raised a $9 million “Series B2,” adding to its initial round of $20 million. The way Reali works is to hire its own licensed real estate agents, who are salaried and not paid on commission. Buyers and sellers pay a flat rate of $5,000 to $10,000 depending on the price of the property, rather than a several percentage commission. Toronto-based Lane, which calls itself a workplace experience platform, said it would use a $2.5 million funding to expand into the U.S. The five-year-old company raised the money from Alate Partners, Panache Ventures and Colliers/Techstars. Lane said its mo

This episode is on a showstopper brand. A brand that rewired e-commerce. The one and only brand that comes to your mind when you think of buying shoes online - Yes, we’re going to talk about Zappos today. You know what’s the most annoying part about shoe shopping? Somehow the brands don’t get it right. The most difficult thing on earth is to buy the right kind of shoes. The same thing happened to Nick in the year was 1998. He was walking around a mall in San Francisco looking for a certain pair of shoes. Hours passed by, but he was not able to find what he wanted. One store had the right style, but not the right color. Another had the right color, but not the right size. Nick spent the next couple of hours in the mall, walking from store to store, but just couldn't find the right pair of shoes. He finally went home empty-handed and frustrated. Not wanting to give up, Nick went home and started checking out e-commerce stores. He had no luck there as well. There were a lot of small-scale stores selling shoes on

Funding Pesto raised $2 Million angel funding Pesto, a Gurugram based edtech startup raised $2 Mn angel funding led by Matrix Partners, with participation of a group of angel investors including — Swiggy founders, Innov8 founder; Posist founder and OIC Capital’s Jack Yeung. BlackBuck closed its $150 Mn Series D round Bengaluru-based logistics startup BlackBuck closed its Series D round of $150 Mn led by Goldman Sachs Investment Partners and Silicon Valley-based Accel. Zenoti raised $50 Million in a series C funding Washington-headquartered SaaS startup Zenoti raised $50 Mn in a Series C funding round led by Tiger Global Management. Acquisition Gurugram-based hospitality chain OYO committed to acquire Amsterdam-based vacation rental company @Leisure Group. With this acquisition, OYO’s capabilities of asset management and technology will be combined with the presence, local know-how and category-specific expertise of the @Leisure Group in the sphere of vacation rentals. Gurugram-headquartered online travel com

WorldCover raises $6M round for emerging markets’ climate insurance WorldCover, a New York and Africa-based climate insurance provider to smallholder farmers, has raised a $6 million Series A round led by MS&AD Ventures. Checkout, a quiet London-based payments startup just raised among the biggest Series A rounds ever in Europe Checkout raised $230 million in Series A funding at a valuation just shy of $2 billion co-led by Insight Partners and DST Global. Awair raises $10M to help customers like WeWork monitor their office environments Awair has raised a $10 million Series B led by The Westly Group with participation from iRobot, Altos Ventures, Emerson Electric and Nuovo Capital. The company has raised more than $21 million to date We have MongoDB to acquire open-source mobile database Realm for $39 million MongoDB announced today that it is acquiring Realm, an open-source database geared for mobile applications, for $39 million. Microsoft delves deeper into IoT with Express Logic acquisition Microsoft

More than 12 million people reach out to Buffer every month through your content and brand awareness campaigns. They have about 100 thousand new users acquired each month. Don't you want to know what happens behind the scenes? Kevan is the VP of marketing at Buffer. He started out as a content writer and has worn many hats since: product marketer, performance marketer, copywriter, and manager. Kevan is well known for his transparent and thought inspiring articles on social media marketing, content marketing and managing teams. In today’s episode we are going to make Kevan reverse engineer his strategies around marketing and decode content and social media marketing, the Buffer way. Listener notes - 1.31 -- What does a VP of marketing do at Buffer? A glimpse into Kevan’s everyday tasks. 4.38 -- Mitigating social campaign risks and instant crisis in a remote team 6.00 -- Brand awareness and content marketing strategy at Buffer 7.40 -- Ideal content marketing goals 10.25 -- Step-by-step walk through of the proc

Sean, founder and CEO of GrowthHackers, is a leading authority on growth hacking. He coined the term “Growth Hacking” to describe the sustainable growth approach used by hyper-growth companies like Facebook, Airbnb and Amazon. He has directly led growth at Dropbox, LogMeIn, Lookout, and Eventbrite and has also provided coaching and workshops to some of the world’s fastest growing companies. There are companies that grow and companies like Dropbox that spawn and sprout. Many of us have always wondered if we would ever be able to take the road taken by Dropbox, to be able to reach a revenue of $1billion in the blink of an eye. The answer is growth hacking. Growth Hacking is like AI - it’s everywhere but no one really understands it. You need an expert to put things into perspective, who better than the person who coined the term “Growth Hackers”. That’s why we invited Sean to help us debunk behind the scenes of growth at Dropbox, LogMeIn, Lookout, Eventbrite, and GrowthHackers. Listener's notes [01.40] -- Appro

How many of you feel that your social media engagement is dropping constantly compared to before? With so much noise around social media and strategies for branding, marketing, and customer service on social, it’s high time we got some advice from an expert on how to truly deal with customer experience on social. In this episode, Dan unveils a winning formula to influence customer love on social also talks about how you can make your brand lovers be louder than your haters. Listener Notes - 1.06 - Social media’s growing role in the overall customer experience 3.20 - Using social media as a medium to test and scale marketing, positioning hypothesis 6.15 - Managing crisis on social 11.53 - Hiring for a stellar social media team and ensuring that they align with the marketing and support folks. 17.18 - Shift in focus from one-to-many broadcast to one-to-one messaging on social 21.30 A winning formula to influence customer love on social - how do you make the lovers to be louder than haters. 27.30 - One advice t

As marketers, our job doesn’t end at getting people to our website. It’s when they perform a desirable action is when we actually hit our KPIs. If there’s one vehicle that can help us with this, it’s CRO. In this episode, we talk to Peep Laja, Founder of ConversionXL about: CRO advice for businesses at each stage Trends in CRO Behavioral design Why process matters over tactics in CRO The interdependency between CRO and SEO, and The right skills for a CRO expert

Video personalization is evolving to become the full proof solution for quality lead generation. The perceived limitations like spending $$$$ to outsource videos and thinking about videos for only a big brand campaign is a thing of the past now. Tyler joins us to talk about: How to build a culture where people aren’t intimidated to incorporate videos Why the goals for any video campaign shouldn’t be views but conversion How to associate videos to individual accounts How to increase the lifeline of videos, and How to take your video marketing to a next level: a 3-step approach Listener notes: [01.46] -- The evolution of video marketing [05.10] -- Targeted text emails and display ads don’t stand out [06.00] -- The key to ABM programs today [06.30] -- The case of one-to-one videos in sales [09.10] -- Leverage your own employees to produce video [10.32] -- How Vidyard has created a video culture [13.27] -- Proactively thinking videos [16.31] -- Now: “Video complements text.” Future: “Text supports video.” [19.1

This episode brings different perspectives together — on similar gaps but different approaches by different people. Taking the center stage are leaders from companies like Cisco, Typeform, ChartMogul, Mad Street Den, and Appcues. We talk to them about numbers in their domain, productivity hacks, secrets for hiring, learning resources, and more.

When a giant multinational conglomerate specializing in hardware and high tech enters the Saas business, things massively change. The center of all the change is the customer — new processes, touchpoints, and the need for a unified experience. David Sakamoto joins us to talk about: -How Cisco delivers customer success at scale Segmenting customers when the world is your audience Lessons smaller businesses can apply from Cisco’s customer success philosophy Why culture needs to be at the forefront of the change, and The most important trait needed in a customer success candidate

Search Engine Optimization. This relentless universe of researching, creating, curating, interlinking, auditing, analyzing, re-researching, and so on is at the forefront of every business. While the individual avenues of SEO are talked about in depth, there exists a gap in understanding how to look at SEO holistically and tie it to bigger marketing goals. There are also questions around quality vs quantity and finding a balance between the two – If 10 blog posts and 20 landing pages a month is really THE answer and if a search engine world exists outside of Google. (Yes, we just said that!) Our tete-a-tete with Dan talks about approaching SEO holistically, the biggest source of views on YouTube, and top 3 insights from interviewing close to 100 SEO experts on his podcast. Listener notes: [00.50] -- Two monumental changes in SEO in the last 10 years [01.35] -- Technical SEO Renaissance [03.37] -- Why 10 blog posts a week without a marketing reason can hurt your SEO [04.45] -- SEO tactics without business reaso

At Typeform everything is centered around the customer and you will concur when you hear this: The customer success division in the company is responsible for sales, account management, and prospecting functions. And to evoke your curiosity a little further, the sales team operates without any quotas or commissions. David Apple, General Manager - US and VP of Customer Success at Typeform joins us to talk about how his team operates, competition, difficult customers, hiring for customer success, and the journey from football (Barcelona) to American football (Silicon Valley). Listener Notes: [00.23] -- Net retention has done more harm than good [01.20] -- Customer success is the champion of net retention, not owner [02.18] -- If you’re looking for a push sales guy, I am not your guy. [03.35] -- Sales team not commissioned at Typeform (to avoid negative incentive) [04.37] -- If self-service is what customers want, let it be [05.33] -- Typeform is more inward focussed [07.15] -- Breakdown of an email response to