Instructure raises $40 million in Series E funding

Instructure is a software-as-a-service technology company that is known for creating the Canvas learning management system. Instructure has recently raised $40 million in Series E funding. This round of funding was provided by Bessemer Venture Partners and EPIC Ventures. More details below:

Press Release

Instructure, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that created the Canvas learning management system, today announced it has raised $40 million in a Series E round of funding. The pre-IPO investment is led by Insight Venture Partners with Bessemer Venture Partners and EPIC Ventures participating. The investment will finance the launch of Bridge, a cloud-based corporate learning and engagement platform that signals Instructure’s expansion into the learning segment of the enterprise market.

The investment brings Instructure’s total venture backing to approximately $90 million. Current investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, EPIC Ventures, Insight Ventures and OpenView Venture Partners. The funding will help the company continue to invest in the higher education and K-12 markets with its flagship product, Canvas, while expanding to help enterprises assess and improve employee engagement through Bridge. Foundation partners include CLEARLINK, OpenTable and Oregon State University.

“This funding allows us to continue to innovate in education while simultaneously expanding to the learning portion of human capital management market,” said Josh Coates, CEO at Instructure. “We believe Bridge makes it easier for businesses to improve employee engagement and learning, just as Canvas made it easier for educators to improve teaching and learning.”

Since its formal launch in 2011, the Canvas LMS has attracted 18 million students and teachers from more than 1,200 universities, colleges and K-12 school districts. Bridge, which Instructure launched in response to the increasing dissatisfaction in the marketplace with existing corporate learning and engagement systems, will help organizations and businesses assess employee sentiment, build knowledge and align employee and organizational goals.

“Education is no longer confined to academic classrooms, and we’re excited to partner with a leading technology company like Instructure to help respond to a corporate business need and expand its market footprint,” said Ryan Hinkle, managing director at Insight Venture Partners. “Instructure has already achieved a leadership position in cloud-based learning software for education, and the next logical step is to broaden its scope to providing learning technology to other markets.”

About Instructure

Instructure, Inc. is the software-as-a-service (SaaS) technology company that makes smart software that makes people smarter. Its cloud-based Canvas learning management system (LMS) now connects more than 18 million teachers and learners at over 1,200 higher ed and K-12 institutions throughout the world. Because learning doesn’t end after graduation, Instructure also offers Bridge, the modern learning and engagement platform that enables organizations of every kind to engage with employees by measuring and improving employee sentiment, alignment, and knowledge in real time. Learn more about Canvas at www.CanvasLMS.com and Bridge at www.GetBridge.com.

About Insight Venture Partners

Insight Venture Partners is a leading global venture capital and private equity firm investing in high-growth technology and software companies that are driving transformative change in their industries. Founded in 1995, Insight has raised more than $8 billion and invested in more than 200 companies worldwide. Its mission is to find, fund and work successfully with visionary executives providing them with practical, hands-on growth expertise to foster long-term success. For more information on Insight and all of its investments, visit www.insightpartners.com or follow us on twitter: @insightpartners.com.

Urban Airship raises $21 million

Urban Airship is a company that enables brands to build relationships with their connect customers through their mobile relationship management technology. Investors in this round include August Capital, Foundry Group, Franklin Park Associates, QuestMark Partners, True Ventures and Verizon Ventures. More details below:

PRESS RELEASE

PORTLAND, OR–(Marketwired – Feb 20, 2015) – On the heels of doubling its customer base in 2014, Urban Airship, the global leader in Mobile Relationship Management, today announced appointments for three new executive roles and the completion of its $21 million Series D follow-on financing. This financing round brings the total raised by Urban Airship to $67.6 million, and included new and existing investors: August Capital, Foundry Group, Franklin Park Associates, QuestMark Partners, True Ventures and Verizon Ventures.

New executives joining Urban Airship include Erin Hintz as CMO and Mike Musson as SVP of strategy & business development. Brent Hieggelke, whose three-year tenure as CMO helped Urban Airship become the market and mind share leader in mobile app engagement, is now the company’s chief mobile evangelist. In this role, Hieggelke will be responsible for uncovering and inspiring innovation with customers, app development and agency partners, mobile platform providers and the industry-at-large.

Erin Hintz brings a wealth of enterprise, SMB and consumer marketing experience to Urban Airship, where as CMO she will be responsible for the company’s market growth strategy, demand-generation, communications and product marketing. Previously, Hintz served as the vice president and general manager of global marketing and ecommerce for the Citrix SaaS Division, driving all global marketing activities to grow revenues from $350M to $700M. Prior to Citrix, Erin led the worldwide marketing organization of Symantec’s Norton consumer business, growing revenues from $350M to more than $2B dollars during her tenure.

As senior vice president of strategy & business development for Urban Airship, Mike Musson will utilize more than 25 years’ experience in assessing technology markets, developing strategic points of view and identifying and executing partnerships and acquisitions. Previously, Mike was vice president of business development at the Citrix SaaS Division where he led teams responsible for strategic partnerships and M&A activity, completing eight acquisitions and expanding the division’s addressable market opportunity by $10B over eight years through solution expansions and new market entry into China and Japan. Prior to Citrix, Musson was the co-founder and CEO of Tournabout, Inc. (sold to Novint Technologies) and held executive-level positions at Oracle, Applied Materials, Software.com and Openwave.

“With today’s executive appointments we’re expanding our leadership capacity to focus more deeply on our customers and the market as we scale our business globally,” said Brett Caine, CEO and president, Urban Airship. “We’re bringing on executives with strong, proven leadership to drive mobile-first innovations that re-imagine consumers’ mobile experiences and the business results they achieve for our customers.”

Analysis of SDKs embedded in App Store apps in January 2015, shows Urban Airship’s market penetration to be four times higher than all of its primary competitors combined. In addition, VB Insights estimates the mobile marketing automation industry to double or even triple in size in 2015, stating: “From an enterprise standpoint, there is almost certainly no better-penetrated mobile marketing software than Urban Airship … Urban Airship developers utilize mobile marketing automation features to a greater degree than just about any other solution on the market” (“Mobile Marketing Automation: How the most successful apps drive massive engagement & monetization,” VB Insights, February 5, 2015).

About Urban Airship

Urban Airship enables brands to build relationships with their constantly connected customers through Mobile Relationship Management. Its solutions streamline the creation, delivery and management of highly targeted cross-platform mobile push messages, in-app messages, rich app pages, Apple Passbook passes and Google Wallet cards. With billions of messages and tens of thousands of passes delivered each month, Urban Airship’s technology sparks exceptional consumer experiences, drives app engagement and increases customer loyalty and lifetime value for the world’s largest retail, media & entertainment, sports and travel & hospitality brands. For more information, visit www.urbanairship.com and follow us on Twitter @urbanairship.

Betterment raises $60 million in funding

Betterment is an automated investing service that has raised $60 million in funding. Francisco Partners led this round of funding with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures and Northwestern Mutual Capital. More details below:

PRESS RELEASE

NEW YORK – February 19, 2015 – Betterment, the largest and fastest growing automated investing service, today announced the close of a $60 million round of growth funding. Global private equity firm Francisco Partners led the financing, which includes participation from previous investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, and Northwestern Mutual Capital.

“Our growth has continued to accelerate,” said Jon Stein, Betterment Founder and CEO. “More people are becoming Betterment customers every day, and our existing customers continue to invest more with us. This new capital will allow us to grow even faster and increase the development of new products that will continue to reinvent investing around what customers want: a seamless, personalized experience that is aligned with their best interest and optimized for the highest expected returns net of all costs.”

Launched in 2010, Betterment manages more than $1.4B of assets in tax-efficient, personalized portfolios for more than 65,000 customers, by far the largest customer base of any automated investing service. The company offers a seamless, technology-enabled platform that helps people better manage, protect, and grow their wealth.

“We’ve created a new product category over the last five years,” Stein added. “While we’re excited with where we are today, we’re really just getting started. There are millions of people in need of better financial advice and services, and we’re building the smartest technology and making it accessible to anyone.”

In addition to raising the new round of funding, Betterment is welcoming Peter Christodoulo of Francisco Partners to its Board of Directors. Francisco Partners brings significant experience in financial technology, with previous investments that include Prosper Marketplace, eFront, PayLease, Paymetric, Avangate and Hypercom among others.

“We have long felt that the wealth management space was overdue for a solution that could better serve the majority of Americans through smarter technology,” Christodoulo said. “Betterment’s unique, vertically integrated architecture allows its platform to be lightning fast, which is proving to be compelling with customers as thousands fund new accounts each month.”

In the past year, Betterment has unveiled a variety of new features to help improve investor returns, including Tax Loss Harvesting+TM and Tax Impact Preview. The company also recently unveiled Betterment Institutional, a digital solution that allows financial advisors to better serve their clients and make their practices more efficient.

For more information, please visit www.Betterment.com and follow @Betterment on twitter.

About Betterment

Betterment is the largest automated investing service, helping people to better manage, protect, and grow their wealth through smarter technology. The service offers a personalized, goal-based, globally diversified portfolio of ETFs, designed to help provide you with the best possible expected returns for retirement planning, building wealth, and other savings goals. Betterment is a CNBC Disruptor 50 and Webby award winner and has been featured in the New York Times, Forbes, and the Wall Street Journal. Betterment helps people to achieve a smarter financial future with minimal effort and for a fraction of the cost of traditional financial services. Learn more here.

About Francisco Partners

Francisco Partners is a global private equity firm that specializes in investments in technology companies. Since its launch fifteen years ago, FP has raised approximately $10 billion and invested in more than 150 technology companies, making it one of the most active investors in the industry. The firm invests in transaction values ranging from $50 million to over $2 billion, where the firm’s deep sub-sector knowledge and operational expertise can help a company realize its full potential. For further information, visit www.franciscopartners.com.

Wooplr raises $5 million in funding

Wooplr is an India-based shopping app that has raised $5 million in Series A funding. Helion Ventures led this round of funding. Rahul Chandra of Helion Ventures will be joining the Wooplr board of directors. More details below:

PRESS RELEASE

Bangalore, February 18 2015: Wooplr, India’s first mobile fashion discovery and shopping platform,today announced their Series A funding round of US$ 5 million led by Helion Ventures.

The Wooplr app helps people decide what to buy and where to shop based on their interests, location and social circle. It gives the user a personalized feed of curated fashion products. Wooplr’s fast growing community of shoppers of which 80% are women, share fashion inspirations and the latest trends on the go.

The company was founded by Arjun Zacharia, Soumen Sarkar, Praveen Rajaretnam and Ankit Sabharwal and is based out of Bangalore.

The funds will primarily be used to hire top talent, expand the team and grow the Wooplr community as a whole. This infusion of funds will see Mr. Rahul Chandra, Co-Founder and Managing Director, Helion Ventures join Wooplr’s Board of Directors. The Series A financing builds on an exceptional year for Wooplr which saw a rapidly growing roster of clients and market momentum in the fast burgeoning area of m-commerce.

“Wooplr’s offering is well-timed with the rapidly increasing demand for solutions in m-commerce that brings together both, online and offline retailers on a common platform,” said Mr. Rahul Chandra, Co-Founder and Managing Director, Helion Ventures. “We believe the market will continue to see a shift towards m-commerce. Wooplr is a powerful solution for the industry and we are excited to collaborate with and support them as they work to build a great company in an exciting category” he added.

Commenting on the funding, Mr. Arjun Zacharia, CEO said, “Wooplr has just scratched the surface of the potential that m-commerce has to offer in India to both consumers and merchants. The financial support and domain expertise of Helion Ventures and our angel investors will help us execute our vision even more rapidly and with focus.”

The company previously raised $225,000 from a group of angel investors including Rahul Khanna, Sunil Kalra, Vivek Pandit and Jaspreet Bindra.

The Wooplr mobile app was released in December, 2013 and is currently available for Android, iOS and the mobile web.

About Helion Ventures

Helion is a multi-stage, technology focused venture fund with over $600 million under management. Helion invests in technology and technology-powered businesses such as eCommerce, online services, mobility, enterprise software and outsourcing. Founded in 2006, Helion has over fifty portfolio companies and has backed companies like MakeMyTrip, RedBus, TaxiForSure, YepMe, Ezetap and others. Helion has its offices in Bangalore, Gurgaon (NCR) and Silicon Valley.

ScienceLogic raises $43 million in Series D funding

ScienceLogic has announced that they have raised $43 million in Series D funding. This round of funding was led by Goldman Sachs. New Enterprise Associates and Intel Capital also participated in this round. Based in Reston, Virginia, ScienceLogic is an IT monitoring software provider. More details below:

PRESS RELEASE

Reston, VA – February 19, 2015 – IT monitoring software provider ScienceLogic, today announced a $43 million Series D venture capital round led by Goldman Sachs with current investors, NEA and Intel Capital also participating. The investment will be used to accelerate sales, marketing, product development, and international market opportunities.

“We are very excited topartner with ScienceLogic, which is disrupting the multibillion dollar IT management market with products uniquely suited to meeting Hybrid IT monitoring demand,” said David Campbell, Managing Director – Merchant Banking Division, Goldman Sachs. “We were attracted by the transformative market opportunity, the unique differentiation of the ScienceLogic Hybrid IT monitoring software, and the consistent results of a disciplined management team.”

ScienceLogic is experiencing massive growth as enterprises and governments move in large numbers to take advantage of the cost savings and efficiency gained from Hybrid IT – or the ability to burst to the public cloud to meet fluctuating computing and business requirements. ScienceLogic is the only IT monitoring provider to have architected its products specifically to meet Hybrid IT monitoring requirements, across multi-clouds environments. The company recently reported year over year subscription GAAP revenue growth of 135 percent and year-over- year subscription customer acquisition of 125 percent.

“We are thrilled to partner with Goldman Sachs as we maximize our market opportunity to rapidly ramp our business growth and deliver even stronger value to our global customer base,” said Dave Link, CEO ScienceLogic. “The investment caps a highly successful 2014 for ScienceLogic, which saw a huge demand for our Hybrid IT monitoring platform and a huge growth in our enterprise customer base.”

Nearly 80 percent of global enterprises are now leveraging public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) to establish hybrid IT environments and 70 percent of those companies are planning to dramatically increase spending in the public cloud over the next year, based on the current benefits gained.

However, while adoption is increasing and investment booming, most enterprises are unable to monitor and control the accompanying sprawl – lack hybrid IT management skills – and do not have proper visibility into their clouds; this results in significant infrastructure availability and performance risk.

ScienceLogic automatically discovers the entire on and off-premise infrastructure, visually mapping the cross-technology and cross-cloud dependencies, and instantly applying the right monitoring policies. By doing so, this provides a complete end-to-end visibility and understanding into the health and availability of legacy systems and publiccloud infrastructure. Troubleshooting and identify the root cause of issues then become simple, and a task that can be completed in minutes, guaranteeing business services continuity and uptime.

Kellogg Company, a Fortune 500, multinational food manufacturing company headquartered in Michigan, chose ScienceLogic to view and manage their entire infrastructure both on-premises in their datacenters and off-premises in the public cloud, from a single view.They saw this unique capability as key to accelerate off-premises cloud adoption.

“At Kellogg, we are always looking to improve our IT operational efficiency. A big part of that is our all-in strategy on Hybrid Cloud with a particular emphasis on exploiting AWS for efficiency and agility,” said Stover Mcllwain, Senior Director IT Infrastructure Engineering. “With ScienceLogic, we are able to give Kellogg executives the IT visibility they need, while dramatically reducingoverall support and capital costs by over $2 million over five years compared to our previous ITOM suite.”

About ScienceLogic

ScienceLogic delivers the next generation IT monitoring platform for the network of everything. Over 20,000 global Service Providers, enterprises, and government organizations rely onScienceLogic every day to significantly enhance their IT operations. With complete Hybrid IT monitoring, total Amazon Web Services (AWS) visibility, and over 1,000 dynamic management Apps included in the platform, our customers are able to intelligently maximize efficiency, optimize operations, and ensure business continuity. We deliver the scale, security, automation, and resiliency necessary to simplify the ever-expanding task of managing IT resources, services, and applications that are in constant motion.

Pindrop Security raises $35 million in Series B

Pindrop Security is a phone fraud prevention and call center authentication company that has raised $35 million in Series B funding. Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) led this round of funding. Return investors Andreessen Horowitz, Citi Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Redpoint Ventures and Webb Investment Network also participated in this round. Somesh Dash of IVP has joined the board of directors at Pindrop. More details below:

PRESS RELEASE

ATLANTA – Feb. 19, 2015 – Pindrop Security, the pioneer in phone fraud prevention and call center authentication, today announced a $35 million Series B round of financing, one of the largest Series B rounds in the history of the security industry. Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) led the round with reinvestment from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Citi Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Redpoint Ventures and Webb Investment Network. IVP’s general partner Somesh Dash will join the Pindrop Security board of directors.

This round of financing reinforces Pindrop’s leadership in the fast-growing voice anti-fraud and authentication market. Financial institutions, retailers and other enterprises are overwhelmed with identity theft and social engineering attacks from organized, professional attackers. Pindrop’s patented Phoneprinting technology, combined with voice biometrics, is the first and only solution to provide significant relief from these attacks, reducing fraud losses and authentication expenses.

“Over six billion individuals across the globe have access to a phone, yet there has been little security innovation in phone or voice,” said Somesh Dash, general partner at IVP. “Pindrop has revolutionized phone and call center security and is poised for impressive growth. Already Pindrop is protecting hundreds of millions of bank and retail customers.”

“Large financial institutions have traditionally invested heavily to protect themselves against physical and online attacks but now the bad guys have moved to the phone channel. This phone-based crime costs companies billions of dollars, which has made the demand for Pindrop products incredibly high”, said Paul Judge, Ph.D., executive chairman and co-founder, Pindrop Security.

“We are thrilled to have several of the largest US financial institutions and retail companies as customers. This additional investment will enable us to expand operations globally while continuing to serve our current customers with excellence,” said Vijay Balasubramaniyan, Ph.D., co-founder and CEO, Pindrop Security. “As the clear leader in the market, Pindrop is establishing the standard for how enterprises secure the call center.”

About Pindrop Security:

Pindrop Security, headquartered in Atlanta, Ga., is a privately-held company that provides enterprise solutions to secure phone and voice communications. Pindrop solutions reduce fraud losses and authentication expense for some of the largest banks, brokerages and retailers in the world. Pindrop’s patented Phoneprinting technology can identify, locate and authenticate phone devices uniquely just from the call audio thereby detecting fraudulent calls as well as verifying legitimate callers. Named SC Magazine 2013 Rookie Security Company of the Year, a Gartner “Cool Vendor” in Enterprise Unified Communications and Network Services for 2012 and one of the 10 Most Innovative Companies at the 2012 RSA conference, Pindrop Security’s solutions restore enterprises’ confidence in the security of phone-based transactions.

About Institutional Venture Partners (IVP)

With $4 billion of committed capital, Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) is one of the premier later-stage venture capital and growth equity firms in the United States. Founded in 1980, IVP has invested in over 300 companies, 101 of which have gone public. IVP is one of the top-performing firms in the industry and has a 34-year IRR of 43.2%. IVP specializes in venture growth investments, industry rollups, founder liquidity transactions, and select public market investments. Since its inception, IVP investments include such notable companies as AppDynamics, ArcSight (HPQ), Buddy Media (CRM), ComScore (SCOR), Datalogix (ORCL), Dropbox, Dropcam (GOOG), Fleetmatics (FLTX), HomeAway (AWAY), Kayak (PCLN), LegalZoom, LifeLock (LOCK), Marketo (MKTO), MySQL (ORCL), ngmoco (DeNA), OnDeck (ONDK), Pure Storage, RetailMeNot (SALE), Shazam, Snapchat, Supercell, Synchronoss (SNCR), The Honest Company, Twitter (TWTR), and Zynga (ZNGA). For more information, visit http://www.ivp.com or follow IVP on Twitter: @ivp.

About Andreessen Horowitz

Andreessen Horowitz backs bold entrepreneurs who move fast, think big and are committed to building the next major franchises in technology. Founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, we provide entrepreneurs with access to our deep expertise and insights in innovation, business development, market intelligence, executive and technical talent, and marketing and brand building. Find us in Menlo Park, Calif., and at www.a16z.com.

About Citi Ventures

Headquartered in Palo Alto, with offices in New York and Shanghai, Citi Ventures is a unit of global financial services company Citigroup. The Citi Ventures team partners with Citi businesses internally and with leading companies externally to identify, invest in, develop, and commercialize the highest new growth opportunities around the world that directly support Citi’s global business strategy. For more information visit ventures.citi.com.

About Felicis Ventures:

Founded in 2006 by Aydin Senkut, Felicis Ventures is a super angel fund backed by institutional as well as high profile individual investors. It is focused on supporting the best and brightest technology entrepreneurs with capital, mentorship and connections. Felicis Ventures’ portfolio is comprised of innovative mobile and consumer Internet companies including Brightroll, Bump, Crowdflower, Erply, Imageshack, Meraki, Milo, Posterous, Rapleaf and Richrelevance. Recent exits include Aardvark (acquired by Google), GeoAPI (acquired by Twitter), Mint (acquired by Intuit), Mob.ly (acquired by Groupon), Mochi Media (acquired by Shanda Games), Plusmo (acquired by AT&T), Powerset (acquired by Microsoft) and Tapulous (acquired by Disney). For more information, visit http://www.felicisvc.com/.

About Redpoint Ventures

Redpoint Ventures focuses on creating franchise and platform companies for the next generation and broadband Internet, currently focused on communications infrastructure and Enterprise infrastructure software. Redpoint was founded in the fall of 1999 by three partners each from Brentwood Venture Capital and Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), two of the top ten Silicon Valley venture firms. http://www.redpoint.com/

Pinterest reportedly raising funding at $11 billion valuation

Photo pinning website Pinterest is looking to raise $500 million in a round of funding. This round of funding would be more than double its valuation of $11 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal. This round of funding will be raised over the next few weeks.