The Day in SaaS 06.30.21: The $1 Trillion Club, A New YCombinator?, Clickbait's Time in the Sun
After Facebook's Surge, There Are Now 5 Tech Stocks Worth at Least $1 Trillion. It’s incredible to think that Facebook’s IPO traded down, and that Microsoft can be worth $1T even as the #2 in several leading spaces. And that Apple went from almost bankrupt back in the day to a $2T market cap. But that’s the Cloud for you.
Seismic Surpasses $200 Million in Annual Revenue Run Rate. Wow. Seismic explodes during Covid, growing 182% and crossing $200m ARR. Sales enablement has gone from sleepy to on fire, with Outreach at $4B and Seismic crossing $200m in ARR.
Sequoia’s Surge invests $55 mn in fifth cohort along with co-investors. If you haven’t been following Surge, you should. It’s Sequoia’s YC-like accelerator in India that’s minting dozens of interesting SaaS and Cloud companies. And it’s starting to get big.
Clickbait provider Outbrain files for IPO. Outbrain files for an IPO as Taboola trades. Clickbait seemed like a PC Browser gimmick that would fade with curation. But like most things, it’s proven quite durable.
Machine learning startup DataRobot reportedly raises $250M on $6B valuation - SiliconANGLE. Sometimes it’s not even clear what “AI” is exactly these days. A bolt-on? Just clever ML? Well, DataRobot is a $6B example of it being real.
Amazon Acquires Rights to ‘SmartLess’ Podcast for as Much as $80 Million. Podcasts have exploded, but it’s tough to monetize them. There just aren’t enough “slots” in the average podcast to build a sizeable business. Still, their reach is real and significant. Amazon joins the party with an $80 Million play for a piece of the celeb market.
