Basis Set Ventures merges venture capital to form a $165 million new fund

04/24/21 • 2 min

Hawke Ventures raises $5.6M to back digital marketing startups. The firm is mostly focused on products that can be used by small and medium businesses. The firm’s focus is to build a definitive platform for Conversational Commerce. Hwake is trying to build a different venture firm that does not focus on what we think the next big idea is, but is focused on building actual technology that can be used by consumers.
Introvoke raises $2.7M to power online events that can be embedded anywhere. The funding was led by Struck Capital. The startup offers components like virtual stages, chat rooms and networking hubs, all customizable and embeddable on a customer’s website. Introvoke charges customers based on live event minutes, a model that it says is accessible to companies large and small.At Basis Set Ventures, merging venture capital and software development yields a $165 million new fund. That product development is one reason the firm has managed to stay relatively lean and was two times oversubscribed when it went out to raise its second fund, a $165 million.Currently Basis Set has at least three different programs, all aimed to recruit and nurture talent that typical Bay Area firms haven’t traditionally focused on. The first is its Persistence platform, which is designed to help women developers and founders network and nurture connections and foster ideas. The firm also has a service that it calls Founder Superpowers, to help entrepreneurs identify and develop areas of strength while looking for additional tools to augment their capabilities. Another key factor for the company is trying to find a more diverse set of founders with different backgrounds from the typical Silicon Valley biography.

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ActiveCampaign, Sift, AfterShip, Riverside.fm and BigID raise funding

ActiveCampaign raises $240M at a $3B valuation as marketing and sales automation come into focus for Small and medium businesses. The round was led by Tiger Global, with participation from another new backer Dragoneer, along with Susquehanna Growth Equity and Silversmith Capital Partners. This funding round represents a huge leap for ActiveCampaign.

Fraud prevention platform Sift raises $50M at over $1B valuation. Insight Partners led the financing, which included participation from Union Square Ventures and Stripes. Sift was founded out of Y Combinator in 2011, and has raised a total of $157 million over its lifetime. Sift uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to automatically surmise whether an attempted transaction or interaction with a business online is authentic or potentially problematic.

E-commerce tracking platform AfterShip raises $66M in SeriesB. This was led by Tiger Global, with participation from Hillhouse Capital’s GL Ventures. The company’s software enables sellers to track shipments made through more than 740 carriers and handles more than 6 billion shipments each year.

Podcast recording platform Riverside.fm raises $9.5M. The round is led by Seven Seven Six. Riverside.fm is a remote video and audio platform that records lossless audio and 4K video tracks remotely to each user’s system, saving the end result from the kind of technical hiccups that come with spotty internet connections. The company says it plans to use the money to increase headcount and build out more features for the service.

BigID boosts Series D to $100M at $1.25B valuation, With $30M extension. The investment comes from private equity firm Advent International, and brings the total raised to more than $200 million across four rounds. The late-stage startup is attracting all of this capital by building a security and privacy platform.

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Cisco Expands SaaS Offering, Qapita and Free Agent raises funding

Cisco AppDynamics Expands Global Software-as-a-Service Offering With Five New Locations.The addition of five new locations across Africa, Asia, Europe and South America brings the total number of AppDynamics global SaaS locations to nine. AppDynamics offers customers the broadest scale and reach of global SaaS support of any Application Performance Monitoring and Observability companies. Global expansion further provides AppDynamics customers with increased flexibility, scale and cost efficiencies, as well as greater data residency compliance and security.Qapita raises $5 million in funding round led by MassMutual Ventures. Qapita, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup provides ESOPs and cap table management solutions to private companies.
The Qapita funding round also saw participation of Hyderabad-based venture capital firm Endiya Partners and a clutch of angel investors.The SaaS startup plans to use the funds raised to hire engineering talent, accelerate product development and build clientele in India, Indonesia and Singapore. It currently has more than 30 employees.Ambry Hill Technologies Announced the Launch Of Their Cloud-Based ERP Software, Vista Suite.Traditionally, the process of switching from one ERP system to another included extracting data from the old system and importing it into the new system. This is often expensive, slow, and rarely produces good results.Ambry Hill’s alternative to this approach is to connect to the old dataset and integrate that information into the screens of Vista Suite so that it appears to be part of the system. ALTARA Ventures, a Singapore-based venture firm helmed by Koh Boon Hwee and investment veterans, joined the US$12.6 million Series A fundraise for US software startup FreeAgent. The round was led by Pelion Venture Partners and also joined by existing investor BlueRun Ventures.
With the funding, FreeAgent intends to deepen product development and ramp up go-to-market activities