Browsing Tag: Startups

Commercial aviation isn’t typically the place to look if you’re after carbon-light initiatives. Jet fuel isn’t generally very green, and airplanes burn a lot of it when traversing the skies. But supersonic flight startup Boom wants to change the perception of commercial aviation as an emissions-costly prospect, starting with their testing development program for the XB-1 supersonic demonstration aircraft that will eventually lead to the development of its Overture passenger aircraft.

Boom claims this will make it the first commercial flight OEM to achieve this level of sustainability, especially from the very beginning of its aircraft flight testing and certification process. And while XB-1 and eventually Overture aren’t electric or hybrid aircraft, the way the company hopes to achieve this milestone is through a combination of using sustainable jet fuel and carbon offsets (effectively the process of buying carbon “credits” by funding projects that net reduce greenhouse gases) to reduce its overall carbon footprints to zero.

The fuel that Boom is using comes from partner Prometheus Fuel, which is a company that uses electricity from renewable power sources, like solar and wind, to turn CO2 scrubbed from the air into jet fuel. Already, Boom has tested this fuel in use during some of its initial ground tests, and its findings indicate that it should be able to use it effectively through both the remainder of ground testing, as well as into its flight program.

While there is some debate about the overall validity and efficacy of carbon offsets, provided that money from these programs is funneled into the proper initiatives, they do seem to result in more ecological good than not. And any attempt to offset the economic impact of a flight program like Boom’s, especially if it’s carried through to flying production aircraft, should be better for the environment than had no attempt been made whatsoever. Which, by the way, is the case for most new aircraft development programs.

Already, Boom is in the process of building the XB-1, which it will then flight test in partnership with Flight Research during a program in the Mojave Desert at the Mojave Air and Space Port. The goal is to begin testing this summer, and eventually use the information gathered from the XB-1 program (which will be able to hold a pilot but no passengers) to build out the final Overture aircraft that will offer commercial passenger supersonic flight services. Boom has secured agreements with a number of airlines for pre-orders for Overture, including JAL and Virgin.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Boom says its supersonic XB-1 aircraft test program will be ‘fully carbon neutral’

It’s the golden age of design for software companies. Designers are becoming more visible and popular on engineering teams, figuring out everything from the visuals of color palette and fonts to the deeper interaction flows and user experience journeys that underlie products. As my colleague Jordan Crook recently described, that popularity has translated into one of the big venture gold rushes to serve this newly empowered enterprise customer.

Yet, between the Figmas and the InVisions and the Adobes lies a very specific challenge for designers: finding a way to translate prototypes from their heads into usable products for engineers to build on. Most of the design tools on the market help designers build their own prototypes independently, or collaborate with other designers. Worse, they often are unable to handle the complexity of modern digital products, which can end up on a range of end devices.

That’s where ProtoPie comes in. The service empowers designers to create high-fidelity prototypes of products, including products that might end up in such places as digital display kiosks, automobile dashboard screens, mobile phones and others. The tool can also adapt prototypes based on readings from sensors like motion detection. Those prototypes, once accepted, can then be easily handed off to engineering teams for implementation.

In short, it’s “prototyping as easy as pie.”

The Seoul, South Korea-based company was founded by Tony Kim, a former designer at Google, along with two lead engineers at Samsung and Line. Kim left in December 2014 after getting fed up with existing design tools on the market and the lack of a clear winner in the interaction prototyping space.

ProtoPie founder Tony Kim (Photo via ProtoPie)

Over the past few years, he and his team have been building out the full feature set and growing the company within the design community following the product’s first launch in January 2017. Now, the company is charting a vastly growing curve following a switch to enterprise licensing last year, announcing today a $6.3 million expansion of its Series A round led by Vela Partners. The company has collected a total of $9.9 million in venture capital since its founding.

Jenna Yim, who is chief strategy officer, offered an example of a car manufacturer prototyping a product. Most existing software tools focus on validating user flow, so you “click, click, click, and see how the screens transition,” she explained. But what happens if those screens should change depending on whether the user is in the driver’s seat or passenger seat, or whether the car is traveling at high-speed and safety is a concern? ProtoPie is “a lot more expressive than other tools you might see,” she said. “Because of our concept model, we can also create the interaction between multiple device interactions without any code.”

The company says that it has 100,000 global paid users, with major deals with Microsoft, Google and other prominent tech companies. CEO Kim says that “even though we are based in Seoul, South Korea, most of our revenues come from outside of Korea … the U.S. market is one of the big parts, followed by Japan, Germany, and China.”

With the new funding, the company intends to expand its sales team in North America, potentially launching a more expansive headquarters there as well. Kim says he also wants to expand the product’s collaboration features like its content library, so that users can pull pre-made components from other designers online.

The startup currently has 33 people, mostly based out of its office in Gangnam, Seoul, and has an “everyone can work from everywhere” culture.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | ProtoPie helps designers translate their work to engineering without the hassles

Good morning friends, and welcome back to TechCrunch’s Equity Monday, a short-form audio hit to kickstart your week. Regular Equity episodes still drop Friday morning, so if you’ve listened to the show over the years don’t worry — we’re not changing the main show. (Here’s last week’s episode with Danny Crichton if you want to listen; I also just got the pun in the headline.)

Starting off this week the news is not very good.

I start to prep for Equity Monday on Fridays, keeping tabs of themes and news cycles. By the time it’s Sunday night I have a good idea of what the show is going to focus on. And I’m a little tired it being bad news about the coronavirus. Here’s to hoping that we, as a species, make material progress to stopping the damn thing.

In more mundane terms, the disease continued to shutter cities and countries, slowing the global economy. I’d rather focus on the human side of the story, but I’m a financial and technology journalist, so here we are.

Markets around the world are down sharply. Stocks in the United States are set to fall. Tech companies are pipped by pre-market trading to fall even further. Growth and SaaS public shops look set to take the sharpest hit.

Turning to funding rounds this week, just one. Instead of covering a number of funding events in the early-stage market, we’re discussing a single round raised by Capiche — a $1.1 million investment sourced from a number of small angel groups and venture firms. The company — here, on the Internet — is working to connect SaaS customers and power users so that they can share tips, pricing information, and negotiation tactics. As literally everyone knows, the SaaS market is too opaque. Also major tracking entities are thought by some to be too favored towards vendors. Capiche wants to tilt the balance of power towards users, instead.

If that will prove a lucrative model isn’t yet clear, but Capiche is a young company with its first real check. It has time to prove itself. According to CEO Austin Smith, his company has nearly two years (seven quarters) of runway in the bank without generating revenue. The startup intends to turn on income far before its money runs out, of course.

I think we’ll cover more individual rounds on Equity Monday over time as it’s more fun than running through a short, partially-themed list.

Finally, I riffed for you on the Credit Karma-Intuit deal that is supposed to be coming very, very soon, in a formal sense. $7 billion is a lot of money to start the week.

Happy Monday!

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Equity Monday: Stocks fall, Square earnings, and Capiche raises .1M

So far this year, one of the most eye-popping startup exits has been Visa’s $5.3 billion acquisition of fintech data services platform Plaid. It’s a major exit in the white-hot fintech space, and while that transaction is still going through regulatory reviews, already some current Plaid employees are becoming alumni and fanning out into the broader startup ecosystem. Could this be the start of a brand new mafia born out of fintech, à la PayPal?

John Whitfield announced this morning that he will be joining Summer as its head of engineering. As I described the company a few months ago following its Series A fundraise:

The public benefit corporation is on a mission to act as a “trusted advisor” to student loan borrowers. Through its platform, borrowers can get a full 360-degree view of their current student loan situation, and begin exploring options for how to repay it in the most financially efficient way possible.

“At my heart I am a builder,” Whitfield explained to me. He joined Plaid through the startup’s acquisition of financial analytics service Quovo in early 2019, and built out the company’s New York engineering team as an engineering manager this past year. Prior to joining Quovo, Whitfield was CTO of popular New York City-based pizza slice delivery app Slice.

For Whitfield, Summer is an opportunity to take advantage of a combination of his skills coming from a consumer-facing app and B2B2C model like Slice and the fintech integration architecture of Plaid. It’s also a mission-oriented company. “I am a parent of a child in college, and I am familiar within my community how [student loans] affects students and parents,” he said. Whitfield says he has been interested in joining companies once they have proven traction and need to scale from thousands to millions of users.

John Whitfield of Summer (Photo via Summer)

Prior to beginning his tech career, Whitfield was a classical cellist and holds a Doctor of Music Arts.

Will Sealy, CEO and founder of Summer, said that expanding the engineering and data teams will be a huge priority this year. “We are at 25 full-time employees right now, and scaling to 40 by the end of the year,” he said. “And a lot of them will be in engineering and data science.”

Sealy noted that the student loan space is deeply complex, with 16 types of student loans, all kinds of private options and more than 100 loan assistance programs available to borrowers, the rules of which change every year. The hope is that Whitfield will be able to bring his lessons learned from Plaid to think how best to integrate all the streams of data in this complicated space.

As for Summer’s product itself, Sealy and Whitfield said that the big priority this year is to go beyond its “optimization algorithm,” which recommends to its users how to pay their student loans in the best possible way, to actually executing the payments themselves, turning Summer into a “one-stop shop” for all student loans. Expect to hear more from this company soon.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | The Plaid ‘mafia’ begins with John Whitfield joining student loan fintech startup Summer

“What Karius is good at is identifying those novel microbes before they become an outbreak like coronavirus,” says Mickey Kertesz, a chief executive whose life sciences startup just hauled in $165 million in new funding.

While the new money may have been raised under the looming threat of Covid 19, the company’s technology is already being used to test for infection-causing pathogens in immunocompromised pediatric patients, and for potential causes of complex pneumonia, fungal infections and endocarditis, according to a statement from the company. 

Liquid biopsy technology has been widely embraced in cancer treatments as a way to identify which therapies may work best for patients based on the presence of trace amounts of genetic material in a patient’s bloodstream that are shed by cancer cells.

Karius applies the same principles to the detection of pathogens in the blood — developing hardware and software that applies DNA sequencing and machine learning techniques to identify the genetic material that’s present in a blood sample.

As the company explains, microbes infecting the human body leave traces of their DNA in blood, which are called microbial cell-free DNA (mcfDNA). The company’s test can measure the cell-free DNA of more than 1,000 clinically relevant samples from things like bacteria, DNA viruses, fungi and parasites. These tests indicate the types of quantities of those pathogens that are likely affecting a patient. 

“We’re through the early stages of adoption and clinical studies show that the technology literally saves lives,” says Kertesz.

Its early successes were enough to attract the attention of SoftBank, which is backing the company through capital raised for its second Vision Fund.

While SoftBank has been roundly criticized for investing too much too soon (or too late) into consumer startups which have not lived up to their promise (notably with implosions at Brandless, Zume and the potential catastrophe known as WeWork), its life sciences investing team has an impressive track record. “They have the experience and the expertise and the network that’s very relevant to us,” Kertesz said of the decision to take SoftBank’s money. “That’s the team that was on the board of Guardant Health [and] 10X Genomics.”

Both of those companies have proven to be successful in public markets and with validated technology. That’s a feature Karius shares. The company’s published an analytical and clinical validation of its test in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Microbiology showing that its test identified more quickly and more accurately the likely pathogens causing an infection when compared to standard methods. 

With initial validation behind it, the company raised its new cash to pursue rapid commercial adoption for its tests and to continue validating applications of its technology while exploring new ones.

Among the primary areas of exploration is the identification of new biomarkers, which could serve as indicators for new diseases (like Covid 19).

“As humanity we haven’t figured out infectious diseases yet,” said the company chief technology officer, Sivan Bercovici.  “For the microbial signatures that our technology can’t identify, we continuously bring in additional high-quality genomic blueprints from public databases, and we separately aggregate that data in a pool we call  “dark matter” for further investigation. One of the biggest challenges is how to know that you simply don’t know,”

Karius works by digitizing the microbial information in a blood sample and uses machine learning and DNA sequencing to recognize the microbial signatures. The company uses public databases that have records of over 300,000 pathogens. For the ones that the company can’t identify, it creates a identifier for those as well.

At $2,000 per test, Karius’ biopsies aren’t cheap, but they’re safer and more cost-effective than surgeries, according to Kertesz. It’s obviating the need to dig into a patient for a piece of tissue and the technology is already being used in more than 100 hospitals and health systems, the company said.

With that kind of reach, new investors, including General Catalyst and HBM Healthcare Investments, were willing to sign on with SoftBank’s Vision Fund and previous investors like Khosla Ventures and LightSpeed Venture Partners to participate in the latest round.

“Infectious diseases are the second leading cause of deaths worldwide. Karius’ innovative mcfDNA technology accurately diagnoses infections that cannot be determined by other existing technologies,” said Deep Nishar, senior managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, in a statement.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Karius raises 5 million for its liquid biopsy technology identifying diseases with a blood draw

Chattermill, the London startup that offers what it calls a “customer understanding” platform that uses machine learning to gain scalable insights into customer feedback, has raised $8 million in Series A funding.

Leading the round is DN Capital, alongside Ventech and btov Partners. Silicon Valley Bank also participated, in addition to a number of angel investors including Matt Price (Senior Vice President at Zendesk), and Nilan Peiris (VP Growth at Transferwise). Existing investors Entrepreneur First, Avonmore Developments and 2be.lu also followed on.

I’m also told that Price, who previously led Zendesk’s growth in EMEA, will join the Chattermill board as Non-Executive Director.

Co-founded by Mikhail Dubov and Dmitry Isupov in 2015 while going through the company builder program run by Entrepreneur First, Chattermill was born out of a frustration that it can take weeks or months for customer research to yield any quality insights, which would then be out of date by the time it reached decision-makers and action could be taken. Like many problems of scale, the pair believed machine learning could be an important part of the solution, coupled with an accessible user interface that surfaces customer feedback across multiple channels in an actionable way.

Since then, Chattermill’s platform has been used by a number of high-growth companies, such as HelloFresh, Uber, Deliveroo, and Zappos. London fintech darling Transferwise was also an earlier customer — so perhaps unsurprising that its VP of Growth is now an investor.

Comments Transferwise’s Peiris: “Chattermill enables our team to take customer insights deeper than ever before and focus on the key factors that make a difference to our users and drive our growth. I’ve seen first-hand the value a product like Chattermill’s can add to a company and that’s why I decided to invest in this round”.

Agonistic to where the customer feedback is generated, Chattermill integrates with lots of third-party software, aggregating various feedback such as surveys, reviews, support tickets, and social media.

“We have built a large library of pre-built connections to the most popular customer feedback systems such as SurveyMonkey, Trustpilot, Zendesk and Salesforce,” explains Chattermill co-founder Mikhail Dubov.

“A new customer would usually connect a few of these data sources to start with. We then build a model to understand their customer experience from both the data we see and knowledge already embedded in our system. Once this is done, we can start delivering analytics and insights directly to their users in real time and with high accuracy, enabling businesses to make better-informed decisions at a faster speed and scale”.

Asked what assumptions Chattermill got right after raising its seed round in December 2017, Dubov says two key strategies have panned out well. One was to go after “customer-focused” businesses at the start, and the other was to double down on the depth of insights and the product’s ease of use versus “over-investing” in specific machine learning technologies.

“This meant our offering became even more powerful as NLP made a huge step forward in the last two years with models such as GPT and BERT,” Dubov explains. “We were able to swap out parts of our model to improve quickly rather than being attached to a specific architecture”.

However, not everything was foreseen, and Dubov says he didn’t anticipate how much the tech landscape around customer experience would change. “With the acquisitions of Qualtrics and IPOs from Medallia and SurveyMonkey, we now see a lot more attention to the sector from both customers and investors,” he says. “We also see a lot more interest in extracting insight from customer conversations via chat and voice than we did two years ago”.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Chattermill raises M Series A to enable companies to gain customer feedback insights ‘at scale’

Cobee, a Spanish fintech startup that has developed an employee benefit management app and accompanying card, has closed €2.1 million in “pre-Series A” funding.

The round was co-led by Speedinvest, and Target Global. Other backers include Chris Bouwer (co-founder of Adyen) and existing investors Encomenda Smart Capital, BStartup (Banco Sabadell), Lanai Partners and Abac Nest.

Founded in 2018 by Borja Aranguren and Daniel Olea, Cobee aims to help employees “leverage better economic performance” from their salary via a range of employee benefits and discounts offered through the platform. These are managed within the Cobee app and redeemed through use of the Cobee payment card.

The draw for companies signing up is that Cobee already claims its platform has higher engagement than many existing employee benefit programmes. And by being a fully digital and automated solution, there is considerably less administration needed to manage the programme.

“We realized that there is an increasing number of solutions that are being sold as benefits or products to the end employees through their HR department (gyms, insurance products, perks, vouchers, salary sacrifice formulas, etc.),” Cobee co-founder and CEO Borja Aranguren tells TechCrunch. “This, on the one hand, means administrative hassle for the HR departments to manage all the different providers and processes and, most importantly, on the other hand, brings a totally fragmented and unclear value proposition for the employee”.

With this problem in mind, Aranguren and Olea set out to build Cobee, which the pair describe as a fintech HR solution that empowers employees to consume their compensation and benefits on-demand.

“All our efforts are focused on making employees feel happy about their benefits, trying to unify the value proposition in an understandable and easy to use formula,” Aranguren explains. “For the companies, we offer an easy-to-use SaaS platform to configure their benefit offering and upload their employees. For the employees, it is an app and a payment card to consumer those benefits as they like, with funds coming from a company subsidy or from their own salary”.

The current Cobee offering includes benefits like meals, transportation, childcare, health insurance and training courses. Additional options, such as gym membership, are said to be coming in the next few months.

“Our product can cater for companies of all sizes, from SMEs or startups to large corporations of any sector,” adds Aranguren. “However, our main target segment are those companies ranging between 50 to 5,000 employees. We have customers and users like Petronas, Avis Budget Group, Auto1 Group, Opinno, Glovo, and Willis Towers Watson”.

Meanwhile, Cobee says it will use the new funding to “scale up its business model” in Spain and expand into international markets. To support its mission to become a European category leader, the company plans to strengthen its team and enhance its platform by integrating new products and benefits.

The business model is straightforward, too: Cobee charges companies a SaaS fee per active employee. “We follow a pure success-based approach and we only win if the employees win, which, after all, makes the companies win,” says the Cobee CEO. “Besides that, we leverage purchasing volumes to build a marketplace that we can monetize and that also allows us to create savings that can be transferred to our end customers/employees”.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Spain’s Cobee raises €2.1M for its employee benefits app and payment card

Target Global, the pan-European venture capital firm headquartered in Berlin, has raised a new €120 million early-stage fund, following what it claims was only 3 months of fundraising.

Dubbed “Early Stage Fund II”, the new vehicle will see the firm continue to back early-stage tech companies across Europe and Israel, leading and co-leading seed and Series A rounds. It also has a later-stage growth fund and a dedicated mobility fund, and in combination Target Global currently has over €800 million in assets under management.

“Our ‘Early Stage Fund II’ will pretty much follow the same strategy as our ‘Early Stage Fund I’; same team, same size, same investment strategy,” Shmuel Chafets, General Partner and Vice-Chairman at Target Global, tells TechCrunch.

“We had long debates around fund size, and despite it being oversubscribed, we opted to keep it at the original €120 million, which we believe is optimal for European early-stage at the moment and will also us to both deliver venture returns to LPs and give our founders the time and attention that early stage companies need”.

To that end, Target Global — which has a 50-person team across offices in Berlin, London, Tel Aviv, Moscow and Barcelona — says it will continue to focus on startups that are disrupting “truly European, trillion-Euro industries,” citing retail, financial services, food, mobility, healthcare, and manufacturing organizations, and the application of technologies such as SaaS, online marketplaces and e-commerce, and AI.

“Category leaders” that the VC has already backed include Auto1, Delivery Hero, Wefox, TravelPerk, and Rapyd.

“We like to invest in companies that target huge markets and with great teams that have relevant experience for the problem they are solving and that show durability,” adds Chafets. “It is very rare to have a team in the pre-A stage that really has all the answers around product-market-fit and technology. Most companies go through good and bad times, we try to find the founders that would go the distance”.

Meanwhile, Target Global is also announcing that Dr Ricardo Schäfer has been appointed as a new partner for Early-Stage Fund II. He’ll be leading the firm’s early-stage investments in its London office. Described as a serial angel investor and an early backer of Revolut, Schäfer was most recently part of Seedcamp’s investment team, as well as a Venture Partner with Cherry Ventures.

“We are happy to strengthen our London team with such an experienced and successful early-stage investor,” says Alex Frolov, General Partner and CEO at Target Global, in a statement. “With his focus on fintech and proptech, and a hands-on, entrepreneurial approach, we feel that it’s an excellent match both for our Target Global investment strategy and our culture”.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Europe’s Target Global raises new €120M early-stage fund

HealthJoy, a platform designed to make it easier for employees to use their healthcare benefits, has raised $30 million in Series C funding led by Health Velocity Capital. Returning investors also participated, including U.S. Venture Partners, Chicago Ventures, Epic Ventures, Brandon Cruz and Clint Jones. This brings HealthJoy’s total funding so far to $53 million.

By integrating with healthcare service providers and partnering with benefit consultant agencies, HealthJoy simplifies the process of finding and using benefits. Its features include an AI-based virtual assistant and healthcare concierges. The startup says it has a monthly login rate of 33% and that its clients, which now includes 500 employers, see a tenfold increase in the employee use of benefits, including telemedicine.

Since TechCrunch covered HealthJoy’s Series B round last year, the company has launched two new services. One is a price transparency tool called HealthJoy Rewards that allows companies to provide incentives for employees to use more cost-efficient services.

“For example, an MRI in Chicago can vary in price from around $500 for an independent clinic to around $3,500 in a hospital system,” HealthJoy founder and CEO Justin Holland told TechCrunch. “Our rewards platform allows companies to customize the incentive, but we provide nearly 100 recommendations. We’re showing an amazing ROI for companies that have adopted the program since we’re targeting high-cost procedures.”

The second new service is called HealthJoy EAP, an employee assistance program that Holland says is a priority for further development. It gives 24/7 access to short-term counseling, with several sessions available for free.

“Addressing mental heath is of extreme importance for companies in today’s world. Access to traditional counseling is on decline in many rural areas due to lack of access. In cities, costs have risen so many users are priced out of the market,” he says.

The funding will also be used to improve HealthJoy’s virtual assistant, develop new services, integrate with more partners and aggregate data. HealthJoy plans to add 200 employees in its Chicago office during 2021, with the goal of doubling its engineering team. Future plans include working with more small- to medium-sized businesses and a potential partnership to serve Medicare recipients.

Other startups focused on employee benefits include League, Catch and Collective Health. Holland says HealthJoy integrates with, instead of competing with, benefits administration platforms and differentiates by being able to work with any benefits package.

Health Velocity Capital partner Saurabh Bhansali will join HealthJoy’s board of directors. In a press statement, Bhansali said “HealthJoy offers proven technology solutions to help navigate employees through our nation’s complex and costly healthcare system, one that costs US employees over $1.2 trillion each year. Healthjoy has shown that it can deliver substantial cost savings to employers while simplifying the employee healthcare experience.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Created to help employees figure out health benefits, HealthJoy raises million

As Indian startups begin to make inroads in the world of SaaS, Microsoft has taken notice. The American tech giant today launched 100X100X100, a program aimed at business-to-business SaaS startups.

Microsoft said Monday that 100X100X100 will bring together 100 companies and 100 early and growth startups. Each committed company will spend $100,000 over a course of 18 months.

“This initiative will help build scale and create amazing opportunities for startups. Businesses can now fast-track their digital journeys through easy adoption of enterprise-grade solutions,” said Anant Maheshwari, President of Microsoft India, in a statement.

Each startup participating in the program will also have access to prospective customers at Microsoft industry and customer events. Participants also get access to Microsoft’s technology platform, and guidance in fine tuning their business and expansion models.

Microsoft is not a new face in India’s startup ecosystem. The company runs Microsoft for Startups that allows early stage B2B startups to use the company’s Azure marketplace and enterprise sales team. Early last year, the company also expanded M12, its corporate venture fund, to India.

The company’s global rivals Google and Amazon are also actively helping startups in India, sponsoring countless events and bandying out a range of goodies including thousands of dollars of credit to use their cloud platforms.

The idea is simple: If the bets work, these startups are already a customer and their solutions could be beneficial to several tens of thousands of other customers. And it’s a safe time to make these bets.

In recent years, scores of startups have emerged in India to build SaaS software following the success of firms such as Freshworks, valued at $3.5 billion, and CleverTap. Since SaaS startups are not building hardware, or disbursing loans, they often have the best profit margin.

Shekhar Kirani, a partner at Accel, told TechCrunch in a recent interview that his biggest frustration was not seeing many more entrepreneurs build SaaS services. “Anyone with some coding skills and a cheap laptop can build a service and sell to the world,” he said.

At a recent SaaS focused event, Godard Abel, chief executive of business marketplace G2, said that India was already among the top five nations for active participations for development of new business services.

As for Microsoft, expect several more announcements this week as its chief executive, Satya Nadella, appears at company’s flagship conference in the country today and tomorrow.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Microsoft launches 100X100X100 program to help Indian B2B SaaS startups