SAP to acquire IPO-headed Qualtrics for $8 billion

Qualtrics co-founder and CEO Ryan Smith
Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch

SAP has announced its acquiring Qualtrics, the Utah based survey software initially headed for a public offering this week prior to this acquisition announcement. SAP is paying $8 billion in cash for the company last valued at $2.5 billion from a $180 million round from Accel, Sequoia Capital, and Insight Venture Partners.

It was set to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker "XM" after filing an S-1 registration statement with the intention of raising proceeds of $200 million through a public share sale. This acquisition by SAP marks the second largest ever of a SaaS company only being beaten by Netsuite's $9.3 billion acquisition by Oracle in 2016.

(R-L) Ryan Smith of Qualtrics and Bryan Schreier of Sequoia Capital (a Qualtrics Investor, Schreier stood as the partner related to Sequoia's investment in the company)

Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch

“We continually seek out transformational opportunities – today’s announcement is exactly that. Together, SAP and Qualtrics represent a new paradigm, similar to market-making shifts in personal operating systems, smart devices and social networks.” SAP CEO Bill McDermott said.

“The combination of Qualtrics and SAP reaffirms experience management as the groundbreaking new frontier for the technology industry. SAP and Qualtrics are seizing this opportunity as like-minded innovators, united in mission, strategy and culture.” He stated.

SAP CEO Bill McDermott

image : SAP

“Supported by a global team of over 95,000, SAP will help us scale faster and achieve our mission on a broader stage. This will put the XM Platform everywhere overnight. We could not be more excited to join forces with Bill and the SAP team in this once-in-a-generation opportunity to power the experience economy.” Qualtrics co-founder and CEO Ryan Smith also added.

Qualtrics was founded in 2002 and shunned venture funding until a decade later when it raised $70 million from Sequoia Capital and Accel. It went on raise $330 million more from these 2 firms along with Insight Venture Partners. It now boasts 9,000 customers and expects sales for this year to surpass $400 million.

Comments

Meet goPuff, A Low-key Delivery Company Worth $1 Billion

The food-delivery market is one with intense competition. The likes of DoorDash, Uber Eats, Postmates, Deliveroo, Swiggy, Just Eat, Yelp Eat 24, and more are steadily competing for global market share while also raising huge funding. Just recently, Deliveroo raised $575 million in a round led by Amazon. DoorDash has also raised $600 million Series G funding at a $12.6 billion valuation.

Amid the intense battle, it turns out there's one hot startup that has stayed low key to avoid the eye of rivals, but it seems word is getting out. That low-key hot startup is goPuff, on-demand convenience store delivery app that was valued at $1 billion last November after a financing round, according to regulatory filings reviewed by The Information. goPuff ships products to customers from centrally located facilities -- as opposed to direct pickup from stores -- in 81 U.S. cities.

The company -- based in Philadelphia -- stocks more than 3,000 products at its facilities which it then ships to cu…

Lehmann Shows Us Postmates' Cute Little Robot

Amid tittle-tattles of Postmates shopping itself to several buyers, CEO Bastian Lehmann appeared at a recent Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference [video] to talk about the delivery company and the gig economy on the whole. Lehmann addressed acquisition rumors with a casual statement of "..I can’t comment" although he later said the "..plan is to take it public". Postmates confidentially filed for an IPO earlier this year but hasn't [soon-after] followed up with an official S-1 filing as conventionally done.

Shortly after the Fortune conference, Lehmann also penned an op-ed on CNN that pushed for improvement of workforce conditions for gig economy workers and corporation with labor unions. "...Gig companies don't have a long history of working with organized labor, but the way forward depends on us viewing unions as working partners, not sparring partners." Lehmann wrote in his op-ed. "Our business models may be new, but labor organizers have g…

Bird Reportedly In Talks To Acquire Scoot

According to a TechCrunch report, Bird -- the $2 billion valued Santa Monica-based startup known for its on-demand scooters -- is in talks to acquire Scoot, a competitor that has raised roughly $47 million in total funding, and was last valued at $71 million. TechCrunch says Bird has agreed to acquire Scoot although a deal is likely not yet closed. If it pulls through, this will be Bird's first full acquisition.

Scoot operates in the cities of San Francisco, Barcelona, and Santiago, with a fleet of manual kick scooters, electric scooters and electric bikes that users of its mobile app can access. The company has done more than 2.5 million total rides. Its backers include Vision Ridge Capital, India's Mahindra Partners, SunPower founder Tom Dinwoodie and Scout Ventures.

Bird -- led by former Uber and Lyft executive Travis VanderZanden -- on the other hand is much bigger, having raised $415 million in total funding according to Crunchbase data. Its backers include Accel, Ashton…

Toyota Taps CATL For Supply Of EV Batteries

Toyota has entered into a deal with China's CATL that'll see the latter supply electric vehicle batteries to the Japanese automaker. Discussions on new battery tech development, product quality improvements and the reuse and recycling of EV batteries have also commenced between both companies. This deal comes not long after Volvo, another top automaker, inked a similar deal with CATL and South Korea's LG Chem.

CATL is a top manufacturer of electric vehicle batteries, with a 41% market share and $4.4 billion in 2018 revenues. The Chinese company's battery output grew 261.1% from 630 MWh in 2017 to 2.274 GWh in 2018.

As a stable supply of batteries is essential to any automaker producing electric vehicles, having CATL [a top manufacturer that can fulfill huge orders] as a supplier is good for Toyota. Toyota and CATL are not just stopping at battery supplies but also intend to work on other joint battery-related systems and initiatives.

This agreement benefits the two, w…

Cisco Reportedly In Talks To Acquire Signal Sciences

Cisco has been a keen buyer of several startups and well-established companies alike. Just some days ago, the networking company scooped up optical tech supplier Acadia Communications for $2.6 billion. A month before that, Cisco acquired french IoT company Sentryo. Now it seems the company is eyeing another acquisition, with news from The Information [paywall] stating that Cisco is looking to acquire Signal Sciences, a Los Angeles-based cybersecurity startup.

Signal Sciences is one of many startups lurking in the cybersecurity industry. It develops software that protects apps running on cloud providers and on data centers from malicious attacks. Signal Sciences has courted many top tech companies as customers, to name some; DoorDash, Betterment, Remitly, Adobe, WeWork, Glossier, Cisco's Duo Security, One Medical, Yelp, PlanGrid, Procore, Postmates, Tenable and SendGrid. Overall, Signal Sciences protects more than 10,000 applications.

Signal Sciences already has some relations wit…

GM Cruise Raises $1.15 Billion At $19 Billion Valuation

GM Cruise has secured $1.15 billion in funding from a group of investors including Honda, Softbank Vision Fund and parent company General Motors who are existing investors, and funds advised by T. Rowe Price. Cruise made this known via a press release that was tweeted on Tuesday. The investment valued GM Cruise at $19 billion, up from $14.6 billion after a $2.75 billion investment commitment by Honda October last year.

"Developing and deploying self-driving vehicles at massive scale is the engineering challenge of our generation," Cruise CEO Dan Ammann said in the tweeted press release. "Having deep resources to draw on as we pursue our mission is a critical competitive advantage." This investment comes not so long after Uber's Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) raised $1 billion from Toyota, Denso, and Softbank Vision Fund (notably a participant in this round for GM Cruise.)

The Softbank Vision Fund earlier this year also invested $940 million into Nuro, anoth…

Tencent And BMW Collaborate On Self-Driving Tech

Tencent and BMW have reached an agreement to work together on a platform that'll be used to develop self-driving technologies and products. Both companies signed an agreement at a ceremony that held in Beijing on Friday, 19 July. The platform they'll work on is called the "BMW Group China High Performance D³ platform", an IT platform that'll be used for safety validation of Level 3 autonomous driving and early studies of Level 4 in BMW vehicles. BMW plans to begin production of cars equipped with Level 3 self-driving tech by 2021.

Post 2021, the "D³" platform will aid post-production development of Level 3 models and research into Level 4 self-driving tech. Thanks to this partnership, Tencent will provide IT architecture, platforms and tools required for self-driving research and development. The Chinese tech giant will also provide security expertise to ensure both parties comply with Chinese laws and regulations on data security, prevent security ris…

EU Hands Qualcomm $271 Million Fine

The European Commission has imposed a fine of €242 million (around $271 million) on U.S. chipmaker Qualcomm for behavior it termed "predatory pricing". The EU is alleging Qualcomm at some time abused its market dominance in 3G baseband chipsets by selling them at below production cost with an aim to force competitor Icera out of the market. Such activity is illegal under EU antitrust law.

The EU alleges Qualcomm abused its market dominance between mid-2009 and mid-2011 by selling certain 3G baseband chipsets below production cost to Huawei and ZTE, claiming this was done with an aim of eliminating Icera, Qualcomm's main rival in the 3G baseband market as at that time. An investigation into Qualcomm was first launched by the European Commission in 2015.

The European Commission opened a formal investigation on the 16th of July 2015 and sent out a Statement of Objections [a document stating preliminary concerns of its investigation] on 8 December 2015. Another Statement of…

Big Data startup Domo slashes its unicorn status ahead of upcoming IPO

image credit : Domo

Business Intelligence and Big Data startup Domo which was last valued at $2 Billion in its private round of funding just set the terms for its IPO as of recent and things don't really good for the company's filing.

The company filed for going public with an outstanding 24,953,806 shares priced between $19-22 each which implies an an IPO value of $546 million which is way lower than its $2 Billion unicorn status for the company which raised over $600 million from several investors including TPG, Bezos Expeditions, BlackRock, IVP and a slew of others.

This represents a loss for the company which currently operates under negative cash flow with operation costs of $148.7 million for the most recent fiscal year ended Jan 31 but with only $71.9 million cash at hand.

Domo booked $116 million in sales for the 12 months leading to April 30 2018 and is aiming to raise $189 million through the sale of 9.2 million shares in the upcoming public offering.

Domo will join …

Forbes Predicts The Next Billion Dollar Startups

Every year, popular media publication Forbes dishes out a list of startups they predict will be the next to hit billion dollar valuations and join some roughly 360 startups that are currently in that position. Forbes has been quite good with its predictions, having predicted billion dollar valuations for many unicorns now widely recognized [to name some; Docker, Tanium, Looker, Outreach, Sonder, Opendoor, Deliveroo, Vlocity, Plaid, Segment, Flexport, DoorDash, Away, Lemonade, KeepTruckin and more.

Forbes recently debuted its predictions for this year, selecting some 25 venture-backed startups that it foresees as the next billion dollar startups. The startups selected by Forbes are listed below;

Next Trucking: Next Trucking is an El Segundo, California-based startup that connects shippers and truck carriers in the $800 billion U.S. trucking industry. Next Trucking focuses on drayage [moving goods from ports to warehouses], which is its distinction from similar services like Uber Freigh…

The Techie

Search The Techie

EU Hands Qualcomm $271 Million Fine