Small business loan platform Kabbage nabs $250M from Softbank
Kabbage, a company with some 115,000 customers and $3.5 billion in loans that has built an automated platform for lending money to small businesses and individuals using a large set of data points to determine a customer’s credit score, is announcing some big cabbage of its own today. SoftBank Group is investing $250 million in Kabbage — funding that Rob Frohwein, the co-founder… Read More Continue reading Small business loan platform Kabbage nabs $250M from Softbank
Companies are increasingly dependent on digital platforms for their business growth, and that is giving a boost to analytics firms that are helping them make better sense of that digital landscape. SimilarWeb — which offers analytics and insights about the performance of websites and apps, as well as competitive intelligence about how other apps and sites are doing (covering 80… 
Big data analytics — where vast troves of information are structured and used to help businesses gain more insights into their operations and customers, to develop new products, and to run more efficiently — are a cornerstone of how many tech-centric enterprises run their businesses today. Now the focus is on building solutions that the rest of the enterprise world can use, even if… 
After raising $55 million last year to build its business beyond its existing help desk services, today Freshworks (the parent company of Freshdesk) has made an acquisition to help it fill out that strategy. The company has acquired Joe Hukum, a startup out of India that offers a platform for businesses to build their own chatbots. I’ve asked, but the companies are not revealing any terms… 
Big data analytics continues to be a key driver in how organisations utilise their vast quantities of information to run their businesses, and now a startup that has built a big data platform specifically focusing on data from the public sector has raised a round of funding.
A changing of the guard at TransferWise, the unicorn startup based out of London that specialises in providing money-transfer services, typically with better rates than banks and other incumbent providers. The company’s CEO and co-founder Taavet Hinrikus announced that he is stepping down and staying on in a part-time role as chairman and board member. He will be replaced by his… 
As data protection — a set of laws and practices created across different markets to ensure that our sensitive information does not get leaked or shared without our permission — continues to gain priority in our rapidly expanding digital world, a UK startup called Privitar that is building tools to help organizations keep that data private has picked up $16 million in funding… 
Underscoring the ongoing market demand for security services amid a growing threat of cyber breaches and malicious hacking among businesses that are moving to cloud-based infrastructures, Cisco announced it has acquired Observable Networks, a company that provides real-time network behavior monitoring to help IT teams detect anomalies that might be related to security breaches.