Practo is a Bangalore, India based doctor search engine. The company recently announced that it has raised $30 million in Series B funding. Investors in this round include Sequoia Capital and Matrix Partners. Practo’s search engine hits around 4 million searches per month. And Practo’s clinic management software application Practo Ray is used by 30,000 doctors that manage tens of millions of patients.
Bill.com is a company that offers digital payment solutions. They make bill payment and invoicing much easier. Bill.com has raised $50 million in funding. This round of funding was provided by Silicon Valley Bank, DCM Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, August Capital, Napier Park Global Capital, American Express Ventures and Commerce Ventures. More details below:
PRESS RELEASE
February 12, 2015 10:00 AM Eastern Standard Time
PALO ALTO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Bill.com, the leading company creating magically simple business payments, today announced it has closed a $50 million financing round. Silicon Valley Bank joined existing investors DCM Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, August Capital, Napier Park Global Capital, American Express Ventures and Commerce Ventures, bringing the total amount raised by the company to date to over $100 million. The new funds will enable Bill.com to continue scaling the company to support millions of members in the network and will also fuel ongoing plans to provide businesses nationwide with premier digital payments solutions that make paying and getting paid fast, easy and secure.
Bill.com is at the intersection of banks, accounting software solutions and the Internet. Bill.com provides a suite of digital payments solutions that make bill payment and invoicing processes painless. Each application within the Bill.com business payments network is built in recognition that today’s SMBs lack the proper tools to pay bills and get paid in a fast, easy and secure way. As a leader in the digital payments space, three of the top ten national banks leverage Bill.com to deliver the industry’s most comprehensive A/P and A/R management solutions to their customers. Additionally, 35 of the top 100 accounting firms in the country use Bill.com to maintain financial control of their clients’ payments and receivables.
“Businesses today demand digital payments solutions that can make their lives easier and eliminate the headaches associated with having to process payments, checks and invoices manually,” said René Lacerte, founder and CEO of Bill.com. “With a majority of businesses still using manual processes to manage their A/P and A/R, there is a significant market opportunity for us and our esteemed bank partners to better serve our customers. With this new capital, we will continue to expand our core technology and fulfill our promise to deliver digital payments solutions to businesses nationwide.”
This announcement comes on the heels of significant company growth. In the past 12 months, Bill.com has grown its network over 100 percent to over 600,000 members. Currently, the firm moves over $19 billion annually. Bill.com has recently introduced a number of innovative product offerings including Bill.com Fast Pay, Bill.com Payments for NetSuite, and Intacct Sync 2.0, among others.
“Bill.com tackles a problem that plagues small businesses and distills it down to a simple solution for paying bills and getting paid,” said Jacob Moseley, senior market manager, Silicon Valley Bank. “The company has demonstrated tremendous growth and established itself at the center of the digital payments space. We are pleased to be a financial partner for Bill.com and look forward to helping the team increase its probability of future success.”
About Bill.com
Bill.com (www.bill.com) is the leading digital business payments company creating magically simple A/P and A/R solutions. We are at the center of business payments, uniting banks and businesses on the fastest growing payments network. Bill.com helps over 600,000 network members process over $19 billion in payments per year and saves companies up to 50 percent of the time typically spent on financial back-office operations by securely automating their end-to-end processes. Three of the top ten U.S. banks and 35 percent of the top 100 accounting firms rely on Bill.com as their primary payments solution. The recipient of more than 40 awards, Bill.com was recently recognized as one of the San Francisco Business Time’s Most Innovative Companies and proudly received a PC Magazine’s Editor’s Choice Award. For more information, please visit www.bill.com.
Twitter has acquired a company called Niche. Niche is a startup that helps influential social media experts with endorsement deals. Niche has offices in New York City and San Francisco. Niche is backed by SoftTech, Box Group, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, SV Angel, Advancit Capital and William Morris Endeavor.
ActionSprout has raised $1.7 million in funding. ActionSprout offers tools for nonprofits that want to use Facebook to reach more people. Oregon Angel Fund led this round of funding with participation from Bellingham Angel Fund and Portland Seed Fund. More details below:
PRESS RELEASE
PORTLAND, OR–(Marketwired – Feb 11, 2015) – ActionSprout, the definitive source of tools and knowledge for nonprofits seeking to use Facebook to reach more people, cultivate relationships with existing supporters, and amplify fundraising efforts, announced it has closed $1.7 million in funding. Led by the Oregon Angel Fund, with participation from the Bellingham Angel Fund, Portland Seed Fund and other west coast investors, the financing will be used to further maximize the power of the ActionSprout application and to spread its use to more nonprofits looking to use social media to further their mission.
In related news, the company also announced that Chris Finley, co-founder and former Vice President, Business Development at SurveyMonkey, has joined the ActionSprout board of directors.
“Some ninety percent of nonprofits use Facebook today with the goal of building support and deepening relationships with donors and volunteers. For the past two years our team has worked to develop tools and techniques to take the mystery out of how to make Facebook work for nonprofits, helping them achieve these very goals,” said ActionSprout CEO, Drew Bernard. “As a result, this funding will be used to get our tools and know-how into the hands of more nonprofits. We are excited about our growing momentum and thrilled to have a group of mission-aligned investors helping us take the product and company to the next level.”
Said Chris Finley, “It’s a true honor to join the ActionSprout board of directors and help nonprofits accomplish their missions by bringing people to action through their social media efforts. As fellow travelers in the drive to further the success of nonprofit organizations, I look forward to working with the ActionSprout team to continue to get their tools into the hands of more organizations and continue to build tools that demystify Facebook for nonprofit social media managers.”
Comments on the news
“Facebook is an ever-changing landscape and as a result, marketing here can be a real challenge for nonprofits,” said Kivi Leroux Miller, president of Nonprofit Marketing Guide. “ActionSprout provides nonprofits the tools and knowledge they need to actively grow their supporter base, and more importantly, to consistently engage their fans in their good work with meaningful social actions. We are excited about the future expansion of the ActionSprout technology and training materials that the investment will bring, because it will help make Facebook an even more powerful tool for nonprofits.”
“Social media campaigns designed to capture participant information drives them off of Facebook and most often end in a virtual dead-end,” said John Haydon, nonprofit social media expert and author of Facebook Marketing For Dummies. “ActionSprout has effectively addressed this issue by providing meaningful actions that keep people within Facebook, and making it very easy to people to invite their friends to participate as well. ActionSprout provides two direct benefits: spreading reach and growing supporter participation.”
About the Oregon Angel Fund (OAF)
In addition to being Oregon’s top performing venture fund for many years running, OAF shares in ActionSprout’s social mission, with investment from the State of Oregon, Meyer Memorial Trust, and Oregon Community Fund. Founded in 2007, OAF is a community supported, professionally managed, investor driven angel fund backed by the leaders of Oregon’s business and technology community such as the Oregon Growth Board. OAF invests $7 million annually in the most promising startups and early-stage growth companies in Oregon and SW Washington. Over 1,400 jobs have been created by the 36 companies in the portfolio. For more information, please visit: www.OregonAngelFund.com
About ActionSprout
ActionSprout is currently used by thousands of nonprofits, both large and small, including Sierra Club, Unicef, and Greepeace. ActionSprout tools helps organizations reach and acquire email addresses from supporters, engage existing supporters beyond Likes, Comments, and Shares, and leverage the social network to amplify their off Facebook activities and fundraising efforts. From petition signing to donating, ActionSprout helps nonprofits grow fundraising efforts by reaching and engaging millions of supporters around mission related actions. ActionSprout can be found at www.actionsprout.com and www.facebook.com/ActionSprout.
Readability — An Arc90 Laboratory Experiment Fonts by Typekit
Bivarus is a patient-centered analytics service that works with healthcare companies to measure the patient experience. Bivarus has raised $1.9 million in funding. Excelerate Health Ventures led this round of funding. More details below:
PRESS RELEASE
DURHAM, N.C.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Bivarus, a patient-centered analytics company working with healthcare organizations to measure and analyze the patient experience, announces that it closed a $1.9 million round to capitalize on demand for its software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform. Excelerate Health Ventures led the round, joined by other investors.
Bivarus is the response to the frustration that exists among leaders of hospital-based outpatient service lines, community-based clinics and group practices and their inability to acquire statistically precise data around the patient experience and its impact on care delivery. Current measurement tools are burdensome to patients, plagued by low response rates, and are neither timely nor actionable.
Bivarus has flipped the current method of surveying patients by providing sophisticated yet simple cloud-based services and analytics. This approach dramatically reduces response fatigue, improving patient response rates 3-5x over traditional methods.
“As a member of the UNC Healthcare Heart & Vascular Network, every patient encounter becomes an opportunity to learn and improve,” observed Joel E. Schneider, MD, FACC, Cardiologist at North Carolina Heart and Vascular. “With Bivarus, we’re now able to measure the patient experience with much higher response rates, increasing our confidence in the validity of the data and our ability to exceed our primary goal of improving our quality of care.”
Bivarus has experienced rapid growth, doubling its customer base over the past few months. The company is hiring additional customer success managers, sales professionals and software developers to support its continued growth.
“The market is well established, but has seen little innovation throughout the years. Physicians and nurses continue to express their frustration with tools that are overly focused on external benchmarking. It’s a market ripe for disruption,” noted Gary Abrahams, Managing Partner, Excelerate Health Ventures. “We have talked with dozens of physicians and healthcare leaders who haven’t been well served by the status quo and are desperately searching for alternatives. With Bivarus, providers ‘in-the-trenches’ now have more precise data they can actually act upon to make appropriate improvements.”
Bivarus is committed to building its operations in the Research Triangle region. For more information on current job openings, please refer to http://bivarus.com/company/#openings.
About Bivarus
Bivarus brings an entirely new science of measuring patient experience with its cloud-based analytics platform to hospital-based outpatient service lines, community-based clinics, and large group practices. Measuring and improving care delivery and quality of life outcomes – from the patient’s perspective – has become one of the top priorities of the healthcare system. Bivarus is at the forefront of providing a patient-centered analytics platform for accurately measuring meaningful and actionable insights into drivers impacting organizational and provider performance. With Bivarus, healthcare organizations can more easily identify service recovery opportunities, as well as improve quality, care coordination, team performance and patient safety. For more information, please visit www.bivarus.com.
About Excelerate Health Ventures
Excelerate Health Ventures is a management team of experienced healthcare entrepreneurs with start-up, corporate and investment expertise. EHV leverages the domain experience and contacts of their network of healthcare providers, payers and strategic partners to select, validate, mentor and grow their portfolio companies. This focused approach accelerates the adoption and revenues of a portfolio companies’ products and associated services. EHV offices are located alongside fellow entrepreneurs at the First Flight Venture Center, a technology incubator in the Research Triangle Park of NC. For more Information, please visit: http://www.ExcelerateHealth.com.
AT&T has announced that they will start selling the BlackBerry Passport and the BlackBerry Classic through att.com and the AT&T retail stores on February 20th. More details below:
DALLAS, Feb. 16, 2015 /PRNewswire/ — AT&T1 announced that the BlackBerry® Passport and BlackBerry® Classic will be available at att.com and in AT&T retail stores on Feb. 20.
BlackBerry Passport Features
Exclusive to AT&T in the U.S., the BlackBerry Passport is available in a unique design with rounded edges. The BlackBerry Passport has a large 4.5-inch Full HD square touch screen and a touch-enabled QWERTY keyboard, giving you ideal content viewing without compromising portability. Built on BlackBerry’s secure BlackBerry 10 OS 10.3.1 operating system, the BlackBerry Passport runs on AT&T’s network: the nation’s most reliable 4G LTE network and the network that has the nation’s strongest LTE signal,2 covering more than 300 million Americans.
BlackBerry Passport Pricing
The BlackBerry Passport will be available starting Feb. 20 for $0 down on an AT&T Next plan at $21.67 per month with AT&T Next 24,3 $27.09 with AT&T Next 183 or $32.50 per month with AT&T Next 12.3 You can also get the smartphone for $199.99 with a two-year agreement4 or at no annual commitment for $649.99.5
BlackBerry Classic Features
Designed for speed and accuracy, the BlackBerry Classic includes BlackBerry’s iconic QWERTY keyboard, trackpad and navigation keys, making it easy to communicate quickly and accurately with one hand. Although familiar in appearance, the BlackBerry Classic upgrades the BlackBerry® Bold 9900 experience with a faster browser, longer battery life and more screen space. It also comes with the secure BlackBerry 10 OS 10.3.1 operating system, offering customers access to commanding features including BlackBerry® Blend and BlackBerry® Assistant.
BlackBerry Classic Pricing
You can purchase the BlackBerry Classic for $0 down on an AT&T Next plan at $14 per month with AT&T Next 24,3 $17.50 per month with Next 183 or $21 per month with AT&T Next 12.3 You can also get the smartphone for $49.99 with a two-year agreement4 or at no annual commitment for $419.99.5
Supporting Quotes
“The BlackBerry Passport is ideal for the mobile professional who wants an innovative wireless device focused on security and productivity. Available first in the U.S. on the AT&T network, customers will benefit from the uniquely designed Passport’s enhanced features, including a wider screen, 32GB of storage, and a 3450 mAh battery.” –Jeff Bradley, SVP, Device Marketing and Developer Services, AT&T
“The BlackBerry Classic is an excellent addition to AT&T’s leading line-up of smartphones. AT&T customers will be thrilled with the Classic. It blends the best of familiar features, such as BlackBerry’s QWERTY keyboard with enhanced capabilities including BlackBerry Blend and Assistant.” –Jeff Bradley, SVP, Device Marketing and Developer Services, AT&T
Panaya Logo
Infosys is acquiring Panaya for $200 million to help customers automate their business processes. Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka has a goal of pushing the company into artificial intelligence technologies and retraining their 170,000 employees to help automate tasks. The deal is expected to close by the end of March.
CloudVelox is a company that focuses on hybrid cloud disaster recovery and migration that has raised $15 million in Series C funding. The company has raised a total of $33 million. Cisco Investments participated in this round of funding with participation from Mayfield Fund, Pelion Venture Partners and Third Point Ventures. More details below:
Press Release
CloudVelox, a leader in hybrid cloud disaster recovery (DR) and migration, today announced that it has closed $15 million in Series C funding, bringing the total raised to $33 million. Cisco Investments participated as a strategic investor along with previous investors Mayfield Fund, Pelion Venture Partners and Third Point Ventures. CloudVelox plans to use the funding to build out sales and marketing and further expand its product development efforts.
The Company’s One Hybrid Cloud™ software platform enables seamless mobility of application workloads across data centers and clouds for hybrid cloud use cases, including Pilot Light DR and cloud migration.
Pilot Light DR involves the use of public cloud as a secondary data center. In the event of an outage, the stored environment in the cloud can be “ignited” into production on a pay-as-needed basis. Testing and migration between the premise and the cloud is highly automated. Benefits include substantial reductions in DR costs with heightened trust in DR environments.
CloudVelox cloud migration involves the automation of critical cloud migration processes, including discovery, blueprinting and provisioning of workloads from the data center into the cloud. Benefits include faster and lower cost cloud migrations.
“This is a key milestone for CloudVelox, which supports our view of the market for hybrid cloud automation software,” said Rajeev Chawla, chief executive officer of CloudVelox. “The funding will help us to continue our product leadership while scaling our teams and resources for growing market demands for automated cloud DR and migration.”
Morgan Van Wely, senior director of IT at Impinj, a CloudVelox customer, said, “CloudVelox reduced our expenses while making it much easier for us to actually use and test our environment in AWS. They have built an outstanding product that has greatly increased our trust in our hybrid cloud environment.”
About CloudVelox
CloudVelox is the first company to deliver an automated cloud DR and migration platform specifically developed for the unique operating demands of existing, multi-tier apps. Led by a deeply experienced team of system software and networking executives, CloudVelox gives data center teams the ability to easily protect, scale and mobilize their distributed apps and services into and between clouds, eliminating many of the major barriers to the enterprise adoption of cloud. For more information, please visit: http://www.cloudvelox.com.
