The Day in SaaS 07.14.21: Amplitude Ready to IPO; Nutanix Founders Raise $50m for Next Act; Okta+Auth0 = Big Win
Amplitude Announces Confidential Submission of Draft Registration Statement for Proposed Direct Listing. Just after raising at a $4B valuation from Sequoia, Amplitude files to IPO. Revenue “soared passed $100m ARR last year.”
Former Nutanix execs launch new startup with $50M seed round. $50m sounds like a large seed round, and it is. But not if you last founded $7.5B Nutanix.
Sweden's Hexagon buys Infor EAM for $2.7 bln, develops ties with Koch. Info is a really, really old enterprise / SaaS software company. But even the Oldies have been boosted by the rise of the Cloud. Infor is able to sell one of its slower growing divisions for $2.7B.
Ex-Plaid employees raise $30M for Stytch, an API-first passwordless authentication platform. Another huge seed round for a fintech product that is still in beta. But with an impressive team.
Railsbank raises $70M to build out its fintech-as-a-service platform. Reworking credit cards and more in Europe. “Railsbank not disclosing its valuation, but Verdon hints that it is in the high hundreds of millions and close to $1 billion”
Okta's Acquisition of Auth0 Is Turning Out Better Than Expected. Buying Auth0 wasn’t cheap for Okta. But it’s already working. “It expects Auth0 to be about 200 million in annual recurring revenue, which is about 15 percent of the overall combined business.”
Twilio adds live audio and video streaming options. APIs for audio and video are hot. Build your own Clubhouse or digital events platform now with Twilio. "The virtual event has evolved from an ad-hoc experience to a permanent element of nearly every company's internal and external engagement strategy"
LinkSquares nabs $40M to expand its AI-powered contract platform. LegalTech is a huge space but one that struggled to mint unicorns. But Covid changed that. Legal has been fundamentally changed by work-from-home.
When Yahoo offered $1 billion to buy Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg said he wouldn't know what to do with the money, and would probably just build another Facebook, a new book says. An incredible story. Zuck’s entire management team wanted to sell — and quit when he wouldn’t. But Zuck didn’t even know what to do with the money.
Fintech Unicorn Chime Adds 10 Lawyers Ahead of Possible IPO. A clear sign $18B+ Chime is ready to IPO.