Accounting and financial controls are some of the most important functions of a modern company, but they are also serious cost centers. Hiring a full-time bookkeeper can be prohibitively expensive, and it can be difficult to find financial analysts and part-time CFOs that a company’s leaders can trust. Companies rely on accounting firms to manage these processes, but firms are often slow… Read More
from TechCrunch
The initial hype around bots — applications that run partly or entirely using natural language processing, machine learning, computer vision and other AI tech to help consumers ask and answer questions, buy things and get other stuff done — may have waned a bit, but a startup building the equivalent for the enterprise world, in a fast-growing field called robotic process automation,… Read More
from TechCrunch
TickX, a U.K., Manchester-based startup that has developed a search engine and discovery platform for events and other “attractions” tickets, has raised £3 million in Series A funding. Read More
from TechCrunch
Bugcrowd and HackerOne both launched in 2012 and both companies are competing in the growing bug bounty market to pay a network of white hat hackers to bang on client software to find vulnerabilities. Today, Bugcrowd announced a $26 million Series C jolt led by Triangle Peak Partners. Bugcrowd is built on the premise that it’s better to dangle a cash reward to a group of people… Read More
from TechCrunch
After raising $4.4 million last March, Virtualitics has closed a $7 million Series B round led by Centricus with participation from The VR Fund. The startup is building a sort of “Excel for VR,” that lets people see data in a more immersive and collaborative way. Read More
from TechCrunch
The secret to Spotify’s public market debut is actually an acquisition it made in 2014. The Echo Nest was powering music recommendations for Beats Music, Rdio, Vevo and iHeartRadio before Spotify pulled it out from under them by buying it for a reported $100 million — 90 percent in Spotify equity. That deal paid off big time. Read More
from TechCrunch
Spotify’s “Family Plan,” a variation of which launched in 2014, as well as its “Student Plan” appear to be driving a significant portion of the company’s growth and improving retention, as the company points to it multiple times in its filing for a direct listing on public markets today.
But that also comes at a cost of decreasing the amount of revenue it… Read More
from TechCrunch
Spotify has finally filed to go public. But unlike most tech offerings, Spotify won’t be raising any money by issuing new shares. Instead they’ll just allow existing shares owned by investors and employees to be traded publicly on the New York Stock Exchange. No IPO means there are no investment banks to underwrite and price the offering, meaning the public markets will essentially… Read More
from TechCrunch
Spotify just filed for a direct listing in the U.S., sidestepping the traditional IPO process, and now we’re starting to see some of the true financial guts of the company — and some of the significant risks it faces from challenging services from Apple and Google. Apple, for example, charges apps a percentage of revenue for subscriptions processed through the App Store. Apple… Read More
from TechCrunch
Music streaming service Spotify is going public and they’ve just unveiled their filing. The documents state that it is targeting a $1 billion IPO, but it’s been reported and we’ve heard from sources that the company plans to do a direct listing, meaning it goes public without the fundraising event. The filing shows that Spotify had $4.09 billion in revenue last year, compared… Read More
from TechCrunch