MacKenzie Scott gives $30 million of Amazon wealth to two Philly institutions that serve low-income communities https://t.co/0sJBRzjTnw via @phillyinquirer
Greater Philadelphia's reputation as a center for cell & gene therapy and connected health grew in 2020, driven by breakthrough research, investment & real estate development, as well projected job growth.
We never got around to telling the Roku/Netflix origin story (tldr: Roku started as a Netflix-funded project to build its own streaming box) on Land of the Giants but I did talk to Roku CEO Anthony Wood about it on Recode Media. https://t.co/hc44UFgOkjhttps://t.co/s8gZdZSdTB
"Philadelphia’s ordinance, for example, is particularly tough on delivery platforms, capping delivery fees at 10% of the purchase" https://t.co/2nomkLw1e9
Finite Carbon creates carbon offsets by enrolling private land owners to manage conservation efforts on their own property. BP plans to use the offsets to meet its carbon reduction goals, as well as selling offsets to other carbon polluters.
BP had invested $5 milion in Finite Carbon last year. The amount of its new investment wasn’t disclosed.
Finite currently has 50 carbon projects on three million acres in the United States and generated more than $500 million in revenue for landowners, Reuters reported. Its the largest U.S. carbon offset developer.
An interesting note from Finite’s history is that its first institutional funding apparently came from the now largely dormant Radnor-based TL Ventures, which was once the Philly area’s most prominent VC.fund.
Sean Carney is the President of Finite Carbon, and he’s been with the company for nearly 12 years.
Based in North Texas, ProcessWeaver’s software handles all aspects of enterprise shipping with multiple carriers, often working in conjunction with ERP systems such as SAP, Oracle, etc. ProcessWeaver has more than 200 employees. Its shipping solutions appear to go beyond the chemical industry which historically has made up Elemica’s customer base.
Global annual parcel volume exceeded 103 billion items in 2019 and has increased dramatically in 2020 as the pandemic continues to accelerate the shift to online purchasing, Elemica says. Forecasts anticipate the market to more than double by 2026.
Terms were not disclosed.
Last year, Paris-based Eurazeo purchased Elemica from Thoma Bravo, which had acquired the business for $135 million in 2016 according to Pitchbook. Eurazeo said at the time it would invest roughly $250 million in the deal.
Edison Partners invested $10 million in a Series B in what was then LeadiD, though at that time it then changed its name to Jornaya. The name reflected consumers’ journeys which Jornaya tried to track through historical data, and utilizing predictive analytics for the future behavior. Comcast Ventures was an earlier investor. LeadiD was founded in 2011.
Verisk. (Nasdaq: VRSK) has. grown rapidly, with the help of acquisitions, and now has a market value of $32 billion.
No terrms were provided for the tranasction.
Ambler-based recruiting SaaS firm Phenom People, continuing its torrid growth pace, acquired Endouble, an Amsterdam-based firm focused on candidate experience solutions.. It was Phenom’s second acquisition; In October, Phenom acquired My Ally, an HR technology company focused on automation, particularly for interview scheduling.
Phenom has raised $59 million from numerous investors headed locally by Sashi Reddi’s SRI Capital and Kenexa founder Rudy Karsan’s Karlani Capital. It has 800 employees, 500 of whom are in India.
iCIMS, a New Jersey-based recruiting SaaS company I also watch (its based in the old Bell Labs complex) is further along than Phenom, having started earlier. It is SMB-oriented, while Phenom is more enterprise -focused, (at least that’s been my previous impression). iCIMS, owned now by PE giant Vista Equity, who bought out Susquehanna Growth Equity, is run by former SAP exec and Marketo CEO Steve Lucas. iCIMS has been making acquisitions as well, most recently New York-based Altru Labs, announced Tuesday.
iCIMS said it surpassed $200 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in 2018.
Both iCMS and Phenom are also addressing a new niche, providing tools that help employees track internal opportunities at their own employers.
Twitter says it has signed a multiyear deal to use AWS to power Twitter timelines, shifting away from its own infrastructure (Bloomberg) https://t.co/6FTrXSmnBw#mustreadblogs#feedly
As with Pfizer/BioNTech, a study comparing one dose of the Moderna vaccine (plus placebo 2nd dose) to the 2-dose regimen is of first-order importance. https://t.co/4koiEXxeRG
The new SAP @successfactors Time Tracking solution provides organizations simple, innovative tools to record, approve, and monitor the time of their workforce.
Another month, another state sports wagering handle record for New Jersey. $931.6 million in handle during November. The first $1 billion month, already expected to come soon, now very clearly in sight. Almost all of it online, as first-mover advantage pays more dividends.
The DoorDash and Airbnb IPOs this week cap a string of listings that have showered returns on some of the biggest names in tech investing https://t.co/XfcogQu0dx via @WSJ
Affirm Holdings is postponing its initial public offering, the second company in as many days to pull back from the red-hot IPO market https://t.co/92q29NufCF via @WSJ
CitiusTech Completes FluidEdge Consulting Acquisition and Appoints Eric Schultz as President of FluidEdge Consulting | Business Wire https://t.co/JWRVIpU5lk
Roblox, the popular gaming platform for children, announced in a memo to employees yesterday that it would delay its planned IPO, previously scheduled for December, into next year, the Wall Street Journal reported.
“Based on everything we have learned to date, we feel there is an opportunity to improve our specific process for employees, shareholders and future investors both big and small”, Roblox CEO David Baszucki said in the memo, which was viewed by the Journal.
The staggering post-IPO market receptions for both Airbnb and DoorDash this week led Roblox and its bankers to rethink pricing strategy for its IPO. In its first day of trading on Thursday, Airbnb shares more than doubled from their offering price and ended with a valuation over $100 billion.
AT&T received bids for its DirecTV unit valuing the satellite-TV service at more than $15 billion including debt, with Michael Klein’s blank-check company among the bidders. https://t.co/vYK9Nx2QeF via @WSJ
Ah, but then along came BusinessObjects, and things were a bit separate for a while. Now we're back to great standalone #analytics AND embedded insight to action, all in the cloud and now with new improved #ml inside! ?…
Data scientists are using #AI and other data mining tools to look for previously unseen biomarkers and develop new algorithmic models for understanding disease. Find out more: https://t.co/8w4jvggzds#bigdata#clinicaltrials
CitiusTech Completes FluidEdge Consulting Acquisition and Appoints Eric Schultz as President of FluidEdge Consulting | Business Wire https://t.co/JWRVIpU5lk
“I think there might be too many M.B.A.s running companies,” Elon Musk said, pushing many business-school leaders to defend the degree’s value https://t.co/EHaoVk3AVW via @WSJ
"Klein said floating the unit had been the only way to keep on board the Qualtrics leadership team led by founder Ryan Smith, who was unsettled by the departure this spring of SAP’s American co-CEO Jennifer Morgan." https://t.co/NN4Mja5PwV
A pair of Philly-area leaders in conducting clinical trials, Princeton-based Bioclinica and Philadelphia-based ERT (eResearchTechnology), have agreed to merge.
The transaction will integrate Bioclinica’s expertise in imaging with ERT’s expertise in eCOA (electronic clinical outcome assessments), cardiac safety, respiratory and wearables.
“As our customers continue to transform their R&D operations, we must continuously deliver a breadth of innovative technology and services,” said Joe Eazor, President and CEO of ERT. “Our merger with Bioclinica will allow us to continue to reinvent end-point data collection by delivering higher-fidelity data and more integrated solutions to achieve our customers’ goals for higher effectiveness, greater efficiency, safer trials, and more patient-centric virtual solutions.”
ERT is actually acquiring Bioclinica, though terms were not disclosed.
ERT has 2700 employees per its LinkedIn profile and Bioclinica has 2600 employees, according to an announcement on its website.
European PE firms are the investors behind both companies.
ERT’s investors have been Astorg, Nordic Capital, Novo Holdings, and the company’s management team.
Bioclinica was acquired by Cinven in 2016. Cinven will now have a “significant” minority stake in the combined company.
Covid-19 has shaken up the clinical trials industry, by forcing changes in how trial candidates are identified and where trials are conducted, among other factors.
ERT was hit by a ransomware attack in late September that slowed work for a couple 0f weeks, according to a story in the New York Times.
Soon after, ERT said then- CEO and President Jim Corrigan was stepping down, replaced immediately by Eazor, most recently CEO of Conifer Health Solutions and previously leader of both Rackspace and Earthlink. Its not clear whether the management change was related to the rasonware attact.
Eazor will lead the newly combined companies. The merger should be completed in early 2021, the joint announcement said.
Cranbury, NJ-based Infragistics, a company that builds both user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) tools, and whose mission it is to help its software-developer customers create simple and beautiful applications, celebrated a 31-year relationship with Microsoft recently.
The relationship is significant because it has helped the company’s UX and UI tools get into the hands of Microsoft’s many, many customers.
In a recent interview with Dean Guida, Infragistics founder and CEO, he told us, “One of our key goals is to be number one in the web UI developer tool space. We were number one in the world in the desktop UI developer space. Right now, we are in the top tier, but we want to be clearly the market leader. There are probably four or five ways we can achieve that, considering the way web developers build applications.”
New Tools for Microsoft Blazor
Microsoft has been moving into the web and open-source space aggressively over the last five-plus years, and has most recently created “Blazor,” a new software framework for building web applications, said Guida. Infragistics worked closely with Microsoft to build a library of professionally designed UI components for C# and .NET developers using Blazor. “A significant part of our joint customer base with Microsoft includes C# and .NET developers. Providing tools for Blazor enables them to build web applications without having to learn JavaScript, while allowing us to further expand our relationship with Microsoft’s customers,” he explained.
“With ‘Ignite UI’ for Blazor, we support developers working in Blazor by providing components to create data grids, charts and visualizations which are easy to use, offer enterprise-grade performance, and make it easy to manage data,” Guida said. “There is a big, active global community of .NET developers out there. And with our tools, those developers will be able to use their existing skills in C# and .NET to build web applications.”.”
Supporting the Angular Framework
In September, the company introduced Ignite UI for Angular v 10.1.0, which includes new features and enhancements for its Angular data grid, new theming capabilities and a set of new Material-inspired industry icons to improve productivity for developers creating applications in the Angular framework.
Ignite UI for Angular v 11.0.0 was released in November, just hours after Google released Angular 11, making it one of the first solutions available to support it, the company said. Ignite UI for Angular v 10.2.0 was released just one month after Google had released Angular v 10.0.0, continuing the rapid pace of the Angular team at Infragistics.
Guida said that Infragistics tools are low-code options that allow professional developers in businesses to build professional applications. “By delivering prebuilt components, it reduces the amount of code you have to write to create a beautiful and simple application experience. Our customers are independent software vendors like Intuit, who built TurboTax and Quicken; financial service companies like Morgan Stanley and Bank of America; and most of the big global banks, which build their own high-speed equity trading systems. And millions of developers worldwide use us to build their applications.”
Weathering the Pandemic
We asked Guida about how Infragistics has weathered the COVID-19 storm. “As a technology company, we easily transitioned to working from home,” he answered. “We had a lot of people who were already working remotely and had the infrastructure already in place to support it. As a result, our productivity has remained really high, so we didn’t take a hit that way.”
However, the leadership did worry about its corporate culture being affected by the pandemic. The company offers unlimited paid time off, but was having trouble getting people to take vacation time during COVID-19, when they weren’t able to go anywhere.
“We spend a lot of time telling people to take vacations. … In order to be productive in any role, whether you’re a technology company or not, you have to recover, you have to take time, you have to get good sleep, you have to have vacation. You have to do things that re-energize and refresh.” Guida explained that he wanted his people to take care of themselves, do fun things, spend time with family, pursue their hobbies, so that “when you come back to work, you’re refreshed and productive. It’s a win–win for both business and for people’s personal health.”
The company recently sent out care packages to its employees at home that included branded socks to keep them comfy as they work at their desks. The package also included subscriptions to some online games that people could play with their friends.
Sales Solves All Problems
Guida writes a weekly email to the company’s employees keeping them informed of what’s going on from a business point of view, and once a month holds a video conference with everyone around the globe. Besides talking about business topics, they talk about COVID-19 challenges, and he continuously reminds his employees to take care of themselves.
He added that, while Infragistics is doing fine, the pandemic-related global recession has impacted its sales. “We’re fortunate to have a lot of big enterprise customers, but a lot of the small and medium-sized customers of ours are being very reserved about doing new projects and spending money. So, we’re managing through a recession. Fortunately, or unfortunately, we’re 31 years old and we’ve been through downturns previously, so we have experienced this before, but doing it is never fun.”
The company hasn’t had to lay off any employees, he added, in response to our question. “We’re working super hard not to do that. I mean, talent is of the utmost importance. Talent is at a premium. And, then, sales solves all problems. Now, the one thing I’ve learned in 31 years is that whatever your problem is, sales can solve it. And so, we’re really focused on retaining our talent and using our cash when we need to. Luckily, at the end of 2020, we have a good cash position in our balance sheet, and we’re now able to use cash as an asset to keep our whole team together.”
