企业在线问答公司AnswerDash（Qazzow）获得种子轮290万美金融资AnswerDash成立于2012年，总部位于美国西雅图。
AnswerDash通过技术嵌入功能答案帮助企业更好地回答消费者的问题，从而帮助企业削减相应的用户支持开支，同时保持用户不流失。
本轮融资由Voyager Capital 领投，Arnold Venture Group、Summit Capital、The W Fund、WRF Capital跟投。
UW spinout AnswerDash raises $2.9M to support growth of online contextual help platform
What started as an idea inside the Information School at the University of Washington is now a full-fledged business that’s raising cash from venture capital firms.
UW-spinout AnswerDash today announced a $2.9 million seed investment round led by Voyager Capital, with participation from existing investors WRF Capital, Summit Capital, the W Fund, and Arnold Venture Group.
AnswerDash, formerly known as Qazzow, wants to fundamentally change how online businesses answer questions that customers might have.
Rather than forcing people to comb through an FAQ or use a written-based solution like email or live chat, AnswerDash’s technology embeds answers within a website’s functionality.
The company helps its clients offer customers instant, contextual answers to a question they may have while browsing a given web page on desktop or mobile. When a user clicks on something they have a question about — this could be an image, link, header, etc. — AnswerDash employs a machine learning search process to retrieve the most relevant questions and answers.
The idea is to reduce the amount of time customers search for answers online, ultimately helping businesses improve the consumer experience while retaining revenue that previously could have been lost due to user frustration.
“By enabling users to quickly and easily find their own answers to commonly asked questions, AnswerDash prevents costly and repetitive help requests that would otherwise arrive via e-mail, phone or live chat,” explained CEO Bill Colleran. “AnswerDash also reduces the likelihood that online shoppers will abandon their shopping activity because they fail to receive answers to their questions simply and intuitively.”
Colleran, a former longtime CEO of Impinj, joined AnswerDash in June when he replaced co-founder Jake Wobbrock, who started AnswerDash back in 2012 with fellow UW professor Andrew Ko and their Ph.D student, Parmit Chilana.
AnswerDash co-founders Jake Wobbrock and Andrew Ko.Wobbrock and Ko have held the CEO and CTO roles, respectively, at AnswerDash for the past three years —Chilana went on to become a professor at the University of Waterloo — but will return to their careers in academia this fall.
Wobbrock told GeekWire that “this was always a planned transition.” The co-founders will remain involved with AnswerDash in an advisory capacity, while Wobbrock will serve as a board observer.
“Our goal as academic co-founders was to take the technology we created out into the world,” he said. “We wanted to get the startup going, get it funded, build a great launch team, refine our product, and get customers and value proof-points. Once we had achieved this, we knew that the best people to take the company to the next level would be seasoned industry executives with years of experience building companies and taking products to market.”
The leadership baton is now passed to Colleran, who previously spent 14 years leading RFID technology-maker Impinj, and VP of Engineering Kevin Knoepp, who joined the team in January after spending more than two decades as a back-end technology executive.
“AnswerDash will continue its evolutionary arc from a small, research-based product team to a vibrant, innovative and fast-growing SaaS company,” noted Colleran.
Colleran said that the company has “matured dramatically” since starting three years ago. Now that the startup has established product-market fit — it has “dozens of customers” like Chef, PetHub, and PipelineDeals — it will use the fresh cash to expand its sales and marketing efforts while continuing to improve the AnswerDash platform.
Colleran has lofty ambitions for AnswerDash, which makes money with a tiered subscription model based on the amount of usage its tool gets and also produces unique analytics to clients that can provide insight into what types of questions customers are asking while browsing through a given website.
“AnswerDash’s service enables more efficient, succinct and clear communication over the web and on mobile devices, so over time our market will grow to include almost every website and mobile app,” he said. “That’s a huge opportunity.”
Total funding for the 13-person company is now $5.3 million.
来源：GeekWire
营销数据服务公司Unified获1000万美元投资
Unified成立于2011年，总部位于纽约。
Unified通过行业先进的数据平台为专业营销人员提供分析、方案和广告工具。目前该公司有超过600个客户，包括全球2000强企业和他们的广告代理。
该投资由Silicon Valley Bank提供。
Social Marketer Unified Raises $30M Round Led by iHeartMedia
Unified is announcing that it has raised $30 million in Series B funding, plus a $10 million credit facility from Silicon Valley Bank.
That sounds like a nice chunk of change, but equally noteworthy is the fact that the equity funding was led by iHeartMedia (the radio and digital media company formerly known as Clear Channel). The two companies previously announced a strategic partnership to develop custom products for advertisers, as well as an investment of undisclosed size.
“We specifically chose iHeart because of the strategic value they brought to table in terms of data sets — it’s not just cash,” said Calvin Lui, Unified’s president and chief strategy officer. After all, Lui noted that in addition to its social advertising business, Unified aims to bring data together from a variety of marketing channels, an approach he contrasted with other social marketing companies that are mere “point solutions.”
“We have such rolling momentum with these major brands that we continue to win flagship relationships with, and all of that is premised on having a system of record for all of our data, so we can collect information from multiple sources, extract value and execute against that,” Lui said.
The new money will allow Unified to continue developing its product and find new markets. Lui emphasized that that doesn’t just mean geographic expansion but also adding new products.
Specifically, Vice President of Corporate Communications Dave Donohue said the company plans to expand its data offerings beyond social media, starting with broadcast advertising — another area where it would make sense to work with iHeartMedia. (To be clear, while Unified expands its data business, the ad-buying product will remain focused on social media.)
It’s been more than three years since Unified announced raising a $14 million Series A. Asked why the company waited so long to raise more money, Lui said that the team knows how to “deploy capital very efficiently.”
“We understand that there are cycles to the business and the industry and we’re here for the long-term,” he added.
Unified customers include Tesla, 22Squared, Lenovo and Toyota. Other investors in the Series B include Advance Publications, Upfront Ventures and Foundry Group.
Over the past couple of years, Unified also acquired analytics companies Awe.sm and PageLever. Donohue said the company is open to making more acquisitions, “but this round isn’t aimed at funding acquisitions.”
来源：TC
数据分析SaaS Discern获A轮2000万美元投资
据报道，数据分析SaaS Discern获A轮 2000 万美元投资。
Discern成立于2009年，总部位于旧金山。主要功能是通过特有的数据集、有效的专业知识和技术，为用户提供可行的投资见解。
该轮投资由Artiman Ventures领投。
Discern Raises $20M in Series A Financing
Discern, a San Francisco, CA-based provider of a financial decision-making platform for investment professionals, raised $20m in Series A financing.
The round was led by Palo Alto-based Artiman Ventures.
The company will use the funding to expand its platform beyond the Energy industry to offer modules for Real Estate, Consumer Retail, Banking/Financial Services and other sectors.
Founded in 2009 and led by Harry Blount, CEO, Discern provides a cloud-based platform connecting financial decision-makers to synthesized data and content that is personalized to an individual user’s investment process. The company’s solution continuously scans the user’s universe of real-time data (public and commercial) then signals the user when new, relevant data surfaces.
Discern data can be viewed by sector, by company, and/or by the user’s own parameters, automating and enhancing the work of the traditional data research associate.
The company also has offices in New York.
来源：FINSMES
提供企业内部应用商店的Apperian获1200万美元C轮融资
移动应用管理初创企业 Apperian 刚刚获得了 1200 万美元的 C 轮融资。
Apperian 是一家提供移动应用管理（MAM）的初创企业，成立于 2009年，总部位于波士顿，现有员工 67 人。所谓移动应用管理，是指提供内部开发的移动应用并对其进行管理，从某种意义上来说，可以视其为企业内部的应用商店。其契机是有一部分企业要求提供类似苹果应用商店或 Google Play 这样的公共移动应用集散地，供其在内部发布移动应用。要知道 2007年iPhone 才刚刚推出，2年 后 Apperian 就开始进入企业移动应用市场，这种当时消费者化为主流的移动市场还是需要眼光和勇气的。
从企业移动应用的发展轨迹来看，大多数企业一开始主要把注意力集中在移动设备管理（MDM）上，只是到了最近几年才开始慢慢扩大到移动应用的管理（因为一开始企业并没有多少移动 app）。因此，移动应用管理的功能是很多 MDM 平台的功能扩展，像被 VMWare 收购的 AirWatch、被黑莓收购的 Good Technology 就是这样。不过 Apperian 跟此类竞争对手的不同在于，它支持应用封装、独立应用容器，提供了移动应用安全与动态策略控制，允许客户在 MDM 系统之外部署 MAM，这样的话 Apperian 的客户可以向自己的合作伙伴、第三方人员等提供定制 app，从而更加灵活地进行移动应用管理。
目前 Apperian 的客户包括 Aetna、AT&T、Emory Healthcare、Reed Elsevier、丰田以及 Walgreens 等数千个组织，通过 Apperian 发布的移动应用已经超过了 170 万。
此轮融资由 First Floor Capital 领投，Bessemer Venture Partners、KPCB、North Bridge Venture Partners、Intel Capital 等跟投，此轮融资过后其总融资额已达 3900 万美元。此轮融资所得将用于加强市场营销、产品开发以及增加人力。此轮的领投方 First Floor Capital 是一家马来西亚的投资公司，Apperian 选择这家 VC 的部分目的正是在于希望借此来拓展亚洲市场。
APPERIAN CLOSES $12 MILLION IN SERIES C FUNDING AS IT TRANSFORMS THE ENTERPRISE MOBILITY MARKET
Company Growth Accelerates as App-Centric Security and Management Take Center Stage and MDM Alone is Deemed Insufficient
BOSTON – September 9, 2015 – Apperian® Inc., the mobile application management and security company, today announced it has completed a $12 million Series C funding round. New investor First Floor Capital joins Bessemer Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, North Bridge Venture Partners, Intel Capital and CommonAngels Ventures in backing Apperian. The funding will be used to fuel growth and platform innovation as CIOs and line-of-business leaders increasingly need to secure and manage the proliferation of apps and data in the enterprise.
MAM Offers a Superior Solution to the Enterprise
With enterprise apps, BYOD and contracted workforces on the rise, enterprises are increasingly tasked with supporting an environment of unmanaged devices – mobile devices not under corporate mobile device management (MDM). This creates a barrier that prevents organizations from securely distributing critical mobile apps to the users who need them.
As Gartner’s August 2015 report, ‘How to Live With Unmanaged Mobile Devices’ states “Gartner clients who have tried MDM and have received poor feedback from their workforce, which perceives it as too invasive on their mobile devices, have been inquiring about alternative methods to securely provide enterprise access from mobile devices.”
Even organizations using MDM are seeking out additional layers of security and technology to insulate apps that matter. In “Mobile Applications and Cloud: Companies, Vendors Take Aim at Mobilizing Business Workflows,” 451 Research states, “Enterprise mobility management built around applications represents the future of ensuring enterprise data is protected and locked down and end users have the access they need to mobile service.”
These trends have driven demand for and adoption of Apperian’s mobile app security and management platform. The new funding will enable the company to accelerate delivery of new security and management capabilities as its technology has evolved into the industry’s most extensible platform.
Since completing its B round in January 2013, Apperian has:
Increased its annualized recurring revenue by more than 250%
Increased users under management by 400%
Enabled more than 1.7 million app deployments
Nearly doubled its average account size
Won numerous Fortune 500 and public sector customer engagements, including Aetna, AT&T, Emory Healthcare, Reed Elsevier, Toyota and Walgreens. Increasingly, Apperian is being selected as the corporate system of record for mobile app security and management
“Arming our employees with mobile apps that provide easy access to key systems has been a key initiative to improve the company’s productivity,” said Cheryl Van, Head of Learning and Development at RMS. “Delivering intuitive and private access to these mobile apps is incredibly fast and easy to maintain with Apperian. We’re driving high levels of secure adoption and our team members simply appreciate easy access via their personal mobile devices.”
“We’ve experienced incredible growth in demand for our platform over the past year as organizations are running into the limitations of traditional, device-centric enterprise mobility management products,” said Brian Day, CEO of Apperian. “Some of the world’s largest companies and public sector organizations have turned to Apperian for app-centric security and management methods so they can securely reach every single user. We’re excited to see this validation of our approach from new and existing customers, investors and analysts alike.”
To learn more about Apperian’s Enterprise App Store and Mobile Application Management platform, please visitwww.apperian.com.
About Apperian
Apperian is the leading enterprise-class mobile application management (MAM®) and security platform for the delivery of critical apps to 100% of users across an organization. Apperian provides fine-grained security and dynamic policy controls at the individual app level for deployments where mobile device management approaches are not possible or desired, such as BYOD, contract workers and other unmanaged devices.
Apperian’s easy to use interface offers a private, branded consumer-like enterprise app store that greatly increases mobile app adoption and a comprehensive app management back-end for administrators to easily protect and manage their business apps and data. The company has helped IT and line of business professionals secure and deliver more than 1.7 million enterprise apps to organizations such as Maxim Integrated Products, NVIDIA, Nationwide, New Balance, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
来源： Apperian
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