Goodera Raises $10 Million to Scale Employee Volunteering Mission
Goodera, the provider of technology-based services aimed at enhancing corporate social responsibility programs, recently raised $10 million in Series A funding as part of the company’s mission to bring employee volunteering to the workplace. Investors in the round included venture capital or investment firms such as Elevation Capital, xto10x, Nexus Venture Partners, and Zoom Ventures, as well as backers like Indian billionaire and e-commerce Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal, and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Network.
Goodera executes virtual, hybrid, and in-person volunteering experiences for employees in more than 100 countries and in over 20 languages for multiple causes, including education, climate change, diversity and inclusion, and accessibility. Founded in 2014 and currently operating from dual corporate headquarters in Bengaluru, India, and Menlo Park, California, Goodera sets out to eliminate the friction and overhead associated with volunteering management—from finding the appropriate nonprofit organization in need of volunteer help, to sourcing and finalizing volunteering activities, to handling logistics and impact measurements. In so doing, the company helps enterprises provide on-demand volunteering opportunities for their employees, on activities such as tree planting, park clean-ups, care for the homeless, and social engagement with minority and indigenous young people.
Goodera founder and CEO Abishek Humbad says the fresh funds will help the company make further investments and scale its infrastructure to explore new ways of volunteering for employees at workplaces worldwide in 2023.
Revuze Announces $12 Million Growth Equity Investment Led by PSG
Revuze, the Israeli provider of real-time consumer insights for some of the world’s biggest brands, announced a $12 million strategic growth investment led by PSG, the growth equity firm that partners with software and technology-enabled-services companies to help accelerate their growth. The round was joined by industry veterans Karyn Schoenbart, the former CEO of market research firm NPD Group, and by Tod Johnson, current NPD Group executive chairman. Additional financial terms were not disclosed.
Founded in 2013, Revuze enables brands to understand consumer preferences and behavior by delivering a faster and more efficient alternative to traditional market research. Revuze’s cloud-based software uses AI-based natural language processing (NLP) to gather, cleanse, analyze, and provide insights on consumer sentiment, feedback, and overall satisfaction. By implementing Revuze’s product set, companies can generate deep consumer insights in nearly real time that would otherwise take months to understand.
The new funding will be used to help Revuze accelerate its geographic expansion into the US and scale its technology, while also letting the company continue to innovate and grow its solution set.
Optiwise.ai Raises $1.3 Million for Added Platform Capabilities for Walmart
Optiwise.ai, the San Francisco-based marketplace optimization platform provider, has raised $1.3 million in a funding round led by StartupXseed Ventures, a venture capital firm based in India that provides early-stage financing to startups in the technology sector. Optiwise.ai assists brands and retailers in scaling their e-commerce business across multiple marketplaces by combining AI and the expertise of highly experienced data scientists to provide actionable insights and optimize performance.
With the new funds, Optiwise.ai will continue to invest in its product and expand from its current customer base in North America to emerging e-commerce regions worldwide. More specifically, the fresh capital will be used to support additional Walmart capabilities on the platform, allowing sellers to replicate on Walmart the success they enjoyed doing business on Amazon.
Since its inception, Optiwise.ai has onboarded hundreds of marketplace sellers and assisted them in growing their business through the Optiwise.ai cloud-based platform. Customers report witnessing a 3.2x increase in traffic, a 46% increase in conversion, and a 2x jump in revenue, according to the company.
Hotjar Acquires Research Platform PingPong
Hotjar, the product experience insights firm headquartered in Malta, Illinois, has acquired San Mateo, California-based PingPong to bring user research capabilities to its customers. Financial details of the transaction have not been disclosed, but the acquisition will give Hotjar customers access to PingPong user interviews and testing capabilities, which are core components of the product development process making up Hotjar’s main business and a key complement to Hotjar’s existing functionality.
A panel of more than 175,000 PingPong respondents will also become a key resource for Hotjar users as a result of the acquisition, allowing them to further uncover insights and pain points that would be very difficult or expensive to find otherwise.
Hotjar enables product teams to have empathy with their end-users and deliver value by making the right product improvements. The company’s product experience insights software is used on more than 900,000 websites worldwide, with its mix of quantitative and qualitative data deployed to drive product decisions in more than 180 countries. Founded in 2014, Hotjar today is part of French experience analytics provider Contentsquare, after being acquired in 2021.
Zendesk Acquisition by Consortium Now Completed
Zendesk announced on November 22 the completion of its acquisition by the investor group led by Hellman & Friedman and Permira. The acquisition, made in an all-cash transaction that valued the company at approximately $10.2 billion, was previously announced on June 24, 2022, and was approved by Zendesk stockholders at a special stockholders meeting on September 19.
Under the terms of the merger agreement, Zendesk shareholders will receive $77.50 per share in cash. Following completion of the transaction, Zendesk common stock ceased trading and was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. Now operating as a privately held company, Zendesk remains headquartered in San Francisco.
Zendesk’s new owners are well-known global private equity and investment firms. Hellman & Friedman is a preeminent global private equity firm with a distinctive investment approach focused on a limited number of large-scale equity investments in high quality growth businesses, and had more than $85 billion in assets under management as of June 30, 2022. Permira, for its part, has an extensive track record in technology investing, having committed more than $20 billion in investments into over 70 companies across the software as-a-service (SaaS), cybersecurity, digital commerce, fintech, and online marketplaces.
Author Information
Alex is responsible for writing about trends and changes that are impacting the customer experience market. He had served as Principal Editor at Village Intelligence, a Los Angeles-based consultancy on technology impacting healthcare and healthcare-related industries. Alex was also Associate Director for Content Management at Omdia and Informa Tech, where he produced white papers, executive summaries, market insights, blogs, and other key content assets. His areas of coverage spanned the sectors grouped under the technology vertical, including semiconductors, smart technologies, enterprise & IT, media, displays, mobile, power, healthcare, China research, industrial and IoT, automotive, and transformative technologies.
At IHS Markit, he was Managing Editor of the company’s flagship IHS Quarterly, covering aerospace & defense, economics & country risk, chemicals, oil & gas, and other IHS verticals. He was Principal Editor of analyst output at iSuppli Corp. and Managing Editor of Market Watch, a fortnightly newsletter highlighting significant analyst report findings for pitching to the media. He started his career in writing as an Editor-Reporter for The Associated Press.
