It is a great pleasure for us to announce that one of our portfolio startups, Proxy which magically unlocks doors and access devices by securely transmitting a user’s digital identity signal over Bluetooth has acquired a smart ring wearable company, Motiv.

If you study both startups, you will find out that it’s just natural for both startups to merge. Why?

The newly acquired startup, Motiv offers smart rings that not just track your fitness but also keep your digital identity safe so that you can simply login to your online accounts with just a gesture before your computer. This online security feature of Motiv rings opens lots of innovative options for Proxy because Motiv rings also use Bluetooth for communication, have battery life of not hours but days and are fully waterproof. Currently, Proxy uses your mobile phone to transmit ID signal through Bluetooth which users can’t keep with them all the time. But with Motiv rings which are designed and built for 24/7 use, users can take them anywhere whether they go to swim, bath, cook or even sleep. With this always-on ability of Motiv rings, Proxy can offer its customers to interact with more and more devices anywhere building a smart, innovative and touchless lifestyle for everyone.

Just a month ago, Proxy raised $45M in Series B and they quickly acquired Motiv the very next month without wasting any time. This shows that how much Motiv is important for Proxy. We look forward to see some exciting ideas coming to reality in future from Proxy.

The smart ring offers the unique opportunity for biometric authentication that is constantly in contact with you, continuously confirming your identity and augmenting you and your presence along with your personal preferences, and secure credentials towards devices and spaces around you. The possibility of an ever-present, ever-authenticating identity device, working passively and wirelessly in the background, opens up new ways to augment humans in the physical and digital worlds, create powerful new experiences, and change the way people interact with their environment.

By incorporating much of Motiv’s patents, technology, and advanced manufacturing, Proxy will accelerate our wearables timeline by at least a couple of years. I wish I could share all of the exciting things we’re working on to advance the smart ring forward. What I can say right now is Proxy has already begun work to foster the next paradigm in what wearables can do and has a number of smart rings under design and development, aimed at creating new experiences and unlocking new use cases that will move us further into the post-smartphone era.

This acquisition places Proxy at the forefront of human-machine symbiotic technology that will lead a revolution in the way we identify ourselves to all objects around us and how we interact with our environment. With AR, VR and advancements in crypto coming together, the timing is right for us to create a future we can all look forward to, one where your privacy and personal data stays yours and in your control, where everyone has their own terms of service and is empowered to curate personalized experiences everywhere they go and with everything they interact with. 

Please read full story at Proxy Blog.

Almost an year ago, SendBird raised $102M in Series B and we were thinking that what’s next. We believed the next thing was the voice calling and video recording features that were launched few days ago by SendBird. But, there was more to it and that was the acquisition of Roundee, a video conferencing platform.

The timing to launch voice and video features by SendBird, the world’s leading chat and messaging API platform is very important because video conferencing platforms are most popular and under heavy use these days due to Coronavirus pandemic. SendBird, founded in 2013 and graduated from Y Combinator W16 batch plans to use Roundee’s key technology and experiences for improving its newly launched voice and video features.

“Voice, video, and chat capabilities have never been more important than they are today,” said SendBird CEO and Co-Founder John S. Kim. “Much like messaging technologies, voice and video engineering requires a very specialized skill set if you want to do them well. The Roundee team has developed sophisticated technology from expertise built over many years. It will allow us to accelerate development of our voice and video APIs and continue to push the envelope of what’s possible in an increasingly app-driven world.”

“We’re excited to join the SendBird family. SendBird has created the world’s best chat and messaging technology, and now we can help it further differentiate its service through best-in-class voice and video capabilities” said Sunghyuk Kim, CEO of Roundee.

Please read full story at The Investor.

We are glad to share that SimpleLegal, one of our portfolio startups and a hosted enterprise legal management software has been acquired by Onit, a Houston based company offering enterprise workflow solutions mostly related to legal matters like e-billing, legal spend management and contract management etc. SimpleLegal also offers modern solutions for e-billing, spend, vendor and matter management so, with this acquisition Onit would be able to combine their experience with SimpleLegal’s trendy solutions and offer better options to enterprises.

In June 2017, SimpleLegal raised $10M in a Series A round and after this recent acquisition we believe that SimpleLegal would add great value to Onit in their future success.

“Today, corporations spend more than $160 billion on their in-house legal teams,” Nathan Wenzel, CEO and co-founder of SimpleLegal, said in a news release. “The combination of Onit and SimpleLegal is a game-changer for the legal market and the future of legal operations.”

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Eric Elfman, Onit CEO and co-founder, will be CEO of the merged organization. Wenzel will be general manager of SimpleLegal.

Onit, which is privately held, has more than quadrupled its workforce in just under three years. Earlier this year, it announced raising $200 million in private equity to fuel its growth in new markets, products and deals.

“Onit and SimpleLegal share both a passion for both disrupting the legal technology space and valuing product innovation,” Elfman said in Monday’s news release. “Our shared commitment to elevate legal operations technology is an asset for all of our customers.”

Please read full story at Houston Chronicle.

Almost two years ago, Interviewed – an automated job assessment tool was added to our portfolio and Indeed, a leading jobs site also integrated Interviewed’s job assessment tests with their platform to help employers screen candidates in less time. Indeed was a client of Interviewed but now this relationship is going to change because Indeed has acquired Interviewed. After this acquisition, we hope to see a deeper integration of Interviewed services with Indeed’s platform.

“Indeed’s mission is to help people get jobs, and today we make it easy for millions of job seekers to find and apply to jobs all over the world,” said Chris Hyams, president of Indeed. “Interviewed’s technology is a natural extension, allowing job seekers to demonstrate their skills, and enabling employers to quickly and easily identify the best candidates for their roles. We are excited to have the Interviewed team join us to help make hiring more efficient for the millions of employers hiring on Indeed.”

“We are thrilled that Indeed, the leader in online hiring, will be integrating our platform with their extensive service offerings that work to bring the right candidate to the right opportunity,” said the Darren Nix, CEO of Interviewed. “Indeed’s relentless commitment to helping people find jobs makes it a great home for Interviewed’s tools that strive to cut hiring time in half and create a better experience for both job seekers and hiring managers.”

Please read full story at Business Wire.

ToutApp, an intelligent email solution for sales teams to increase sales through email campaigns, tracking and analytics was added to our list of portfolio in 2011 and since then it raised a total funding of $21.48M including Series A and B rounds. Tawheed Kader, ToutApp’s founder was approached by Steve Lucas, CEO of Marketo, a marketing automation solution and finally Marketo acquired ToutApp to combine their forces and create a next generation customer engagement platform. This acquisition is quite natural and makes more sense for both companies because 61% of ToutApp’s customers already use Marketo for their marketing automation needs.

The price for the acquisition could not be learned, but sources told Fortune it would not produce a significant return for investors. The company had to “right size” some of its operations last year. The company’s annual revenue is between $5 million and $10 million in annual revenue and growing. ToutApp management will stay on after the acquisition.

Marketo CEO Steve Lucas, who joined the company in October, tells Fortune he approached ToutApp about a deal four months ago. The company plans to unveil the acquisition on Monday as part of a new “engagement platform” it will launch at its Marketing Nation Summit.

Lucas says this deal will “bridge the gap” between Marketo’s existing marketing technology offerings and ToutApp’s sales technology.

Please read full story at Fortune.

It’s big news for us and everyone who trusted and backed Cruise, The Driverless Revolution. Zillionize invested in Cruise as a seed round investor. After one year, Cruise raised $12.5M in Series A round and now GM is buying Cruise for “north of $1 billion”. That’s awesome!

General Motors this morning announced that it will acquire Cruise Automation, a San Francisco-based developer of autonomous vehicle technology. No financial terms were disclosed, but Fortune has learned from a source close to the situation that the deal is valued at “north of $1 billion,” in a combination of cash and stock.

Cruise Automation had raised over $18 million in venture capital funding, most recently at a post-money valuation of around $90 million. Investors include Spark Capital, Maven Ventures, Founder Collective, and Y Combinator.

The three-year old company is best known for having created an aftermarket “kit” that allows buyers to convert certain types of cars―namely Audi A4 and S4 models―into autonomous vehicles for highway driving. But GM appears to be more interested in integrating Cruise’s technology into its original manufacturing process.

Please read full story at FORTUNE.

In March 2014, Zillionize invested in Frontleaf and now we are glad to announce that Zuora, a subscription billing solutions provider has bought Frontleaf. The deal’s details would still remain undisclosed.

Zuora, a business set up to help other businesses manage their online subscription models, said it plans to fully incorporate Frontleaf’s employees and resources into its own engineering and sales teams.

That includes Frontleaf founder CEO Tom Krackeler, who will join Zuora as its new vice president of subscription user experience.

“Frontleaf’s technology will enable Zuora to provide subscription-based businesses with the comprehensive analytics they need to understand their user base in a far deeper and more meaningful way so they can design truly compelling subscriber experiences,” wrote Krackeler, in prepared remarks.”

You can read full story at ZDNet.

We are pleased to announce that one of our portfolio startups, Meldium has been acquired by LogMeIn for $15M.

Publicly-traded LogMeIn says it is paying $15 million in the deal for BBA, the name under which Meldium is incorporated. The price includes both a cash payment and a performance and retention-based earn out.

As the name of the startup implies, Meldium effectively “melds” together the sign-on process for a host of different apps, 1,500 in all at present, including popular cloud-based services like Dropbox, Google Apps, Hubspot, WordPress, Zendesk, Salesforce, Asana, Trello, Evernote, JIRA, and Rackspace. One key to its usefulness is in how useful it is for professionals who are not of the technical persuasion.

Please read full story at TechCrunch.

We are glad to announce that Rackspace has acquired Mailgun, an email service for developers to send, receive and track emails within apps and websites.

Rackspace will make Mailgun available to its Rackspace Hosting customers for integrating cloud-based email services into applications and websites. CEO Ev Kontsevoy said the company’s six employees will join Rackspace and move into the hosting providers San Francisco offices.

“Awesome products should be and will be integrated with open cloud platforms,” said Pat Matthews, senior vice president of corporate development at Rackspace. “We want to make it easy for hundreds of thousands of customers to use Mailgun.”

You may read the full story at TechCrunch.

Being a seed round investor, Mailgun was our first investment and our first exit too. Well done, Mailgun team!