Freshworks Is Capturing the Mid-Market - but Can It Evolve From Workflow Automation to AI Governance?
Freshworks is leveraging its workflow‑automation roots to capture mid‑market organizations, now approaching $1 billion in annual recurring revenue. Its employee‑experience suite generates $480 million, growing 24%, while AI add‑ons are paid by 6,000 of its 75,000 customers. The company has broadened Freshservice beyond IT to HR, finance and legal, driving a “one‑in‑five seats” revenue share from non‑IT departments. However, analysts warn Freshworks must evolve from departmental automation to cross‑organizational AI governance to stay ahead of rivals like ServiceNow.
SolarWinds Bets on Partners with Richer Incentives and Deeper Enablement
SolarWinds unveiled a revamped partner program at its 2026 Partner Summit, adding tiered benefits, higher discounts, and a rewards center that lets sellers earn points for cash or prizes. The initiative also boosts partner‑led demand generation with proposal‑based marketing funds,...
Despite Q3 Loss, Lightspeed Optimistic on Executing Growth and Profitability Plan
Lightspeed Commerce reported fiscal Q3 revenue of $312.3 million, slightly beating its own and analysts’ forecasts, while posting a net loss of $33.6 million, wider than a year ago. The company upgraded its full‑year revenue outlook to $1.22 billion and expects higher gross...
Substack Discloses Breach Exposing Its User Details After Four-Month Delay
Substack announced that a security breach exposed subscriber email addresses, phone numbers and internal metadata after attackers accessed the data in October 2025. The intrusion went undetected until February 2026, giving threat actors a four‑month dwell time. The company confirmed...
IBM Invests in Generative AI App Design Startup Anima
IBM has made an undisclosed investment in Anima, a generative‑AI startup that turns UI designs into production‑ready code, to strengthen its push into the emerging "vibe coding" trend. Anima’s platform integrates with tools like Figma, Adobe XD and Sketch, allowing users...
Freshpaint (YC S19) Is Hiring a Senior SWE, Data
Freshpaint, a Y Combinator S19 startup, is hiring a senior software engineer focused on data to expand its HIPAA‑compliant infrastructure for healthcare marketers. The company enables 100s of healthcare businesses to collect, protect, and activate customer data while staying privacy‑first....
Executive Function: Building Systems that Can Make Decisions without You | Jeanne DeWitt Grosser (COO, Vercel)
Vercel’s COO Jeanne De Witt Grosser, former Stripe leader, joins First Round’s Executive Function podcast to dissect what separates good executives from great ones. She details Vercel’s rigorous executive interview framework, the use of driver trees for metric ownership, and...
Leverate to Launch Prediction Market Technology for Brokers at iFX EXPO
Fintech firm Leverate will debut a turnkey prediction‑market technology for brokers at iFX EXPO Dubai 2026. The solution lets brokers add event‑based contracts to existing platforms without building pricing, risk or execution infrastructure in‑house. Leverate’s offering follows a recent trend,...
Bank ABC’s Ila Bank Goes Live with Temenos Core on AWS
Bank ABC’s digital‑only ila Bank has migrated its retail account and lending operations to Temenos’ Core Banking platform hosted on Amazon Web Services, completing the first phase of a broader transformation. The migration, which also incorporated Temenos Payments and Data...
How We Made Geo Joins 400× Faster with H3 Indexes
Floe’s query planner now rewrites spatial joins by generating H3 cell coverages for each geometry and joining on the resulting integer keys. This pre‑filter reduces the candidate pairs dramatically, turning a quadratic ST_Intersects join into a hash‑join followed by a...
Tracxn Continues to Report Flat Revenue in Q3 FY25; Slips Into Losses
Bengaluru‑based data platform Tracxn reported flat Q3 FY26 revenue, slipping to Rs 21 crore, a 2% decline from the same quarter last year. Total expenses rose 8.6% to Rs 22.8 crore, driven largely by employee benefits, pushing the company into...
New Speakers for the Tech.eu Summit London 2026 Announced: Leaders From OpenAI, Notion Capital, PolyAI, Oxa and Many More...
Tech.eu has unveiled a fresh slate of speakers for its London 2026 Summit, featuring executives from OpenAI, Notion Capital, PolyAI, Oxa and other high‑growth firms. The two‑day event runs on 21‑22 April at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre and will...
Zendesk Spam Wave Returns, Floods Users with 'Activate Account' Emails
A fresh wave of spam is exploiting unsecured Zendesk support portals, flooding users worldwide with fake “Activate account” emails. Attackers submit tickets through open Zendesk forms, triggering automatic confirmation messages to large address lists. The campaign mirrors a January incident,...
The Payroll Software Dilemma Facing Accountancy Practices
In this episode, Ian Davidson of Quarry Payroll Consulting discusses the strategic crossroads accountancy practices face as legacy payroll software reaches end‑of‑life, weighing migration to modern cloud platforms against outsourcing payroll to specialist providers. He outlines the heavy resource demands,...
Bringing a B2C Mindset to a B2B Challenge - Piyush Sagar Mishra, Twilio Head of Marketing Innovation and AI, Explains...
Twilio created the Head of Marketing Innovation and AI role for Piyush Sagar Mishra, leveraging his B2C background to re‑imagine B2B go‑to‑market. Mishra’s team built the MAISON framework—a trust‑first AI stack that combines a solid knowledge base, sandboxed models and agentic workflows....
Luciq Expands Agentic Mobile Observability With a Full Lifecycle Agentic Loop
Luciq has expanded its Agentic Mobile Observability platform to cover the full mobile app lifecycle, adding a coordinated four‑agent loop that detects, triages, resolves, and guards releases. The new Agentic Instrumentation lets teams instrument apps in under 10 minutes, while...
AI-Native IT Documentation Platform Redefines How MSPs Work, Solving Pain Points and Generating Value in Real Time
Lexful unveiled an AI‑native IT documentation platform at the Right of Boom conference, targeting managed service providers (MSPs). Backed by Top Down Ventures and led by CEO Pinar Ormeci, the solution replaces static records with real‑time operational intelligence. Core features...
Romanian EdTech Startup Kinderpedia Raises €2.2M in Growth Funding Round
Romanian EdTech startup Kinderpedia secured €2.2 million in a growth‑stage round led by Simpact Ventures, part of a €3.5 million target. The AI‑powered platform now serves schools in over 40 countries, reaching more than 500,000 teachers, parents and administrators. Funds will accelerate...
Battle-Testing Lynx at Allegro
Allegro’s mobile team, after six years with the in‑house MBox server‑driven UI, sought a solution that could deliver native performance while retaining cross‑platform flexibility. They evaluated Lynx, an open‑source framework that renders natively on iOS, Android, and Web from a...
Finova Wins Five-Year Contract Extension with Key Group
Finova has secured a five‑year contract extension with Key Group, the UK’s leading later‑life lender, to continue powering its more2life mortgage products. The renewed deal will see Key Group adopt Finova’s next‑generation lending platform and an agile pricing engine, enabling...
Synthesia and Flatpay Founders Back Pluto.markets in $6M Raise
Danish neobroker Pluto.markets secured a $6 million seed round, bringing its total capital to nearly $10 million since its 2021 launch. The round was led by Seed Capital and featured a roster of Danish unicorn founders from Synthesia, Flatpay, Pleo and others....
Fintower Completes €1.5M Oversubscribed Seed Round
Swedish fintech Fintower announced the close of an oversubscribed €1.5 million seed round, drawing participation from new backers such as Chalmers Ventures, Akka and the Stena family, alongside existing investors like Almi and Inet. The company offers an AI‑driven SaaS platform...
HR Tech Company Talentguide Raises €1.3M to Expand Data-Driven Skills Management in Europe
Ghent‑based HR‑tech firm talentguide raised €1.3 million to accelerate its European rollout. The round was led by NXT II, Travvant, Miles Ahead Capital, imec.istart and several founders. talentguide’s AI‑driven SaaS platform converts unstructured HR data into a skills intelligence layer for both...
Apollo Appoints New CEO to Scale Next Phase of Growth
Apollo.io announced Matt Curl as its new chief executive officer, succeeding founder Tim Zheng who will remain chairman. Curl, who has served as COO and advisor since 2019, helped drive the company’s recent operational improvements and margin expansion. Apollo now...
Qontext Closes $2.7M Pre-Seed Round to Develop a Context Layer for AI
Berlin‑based Qontext announced a $2.7 million pre‑seed round led by HV Capital, backed by AI‑infrastructure veterans. The startup builds an independent context layer that supplies AI systems with up‑to‑date, enterprise‑wide data. Its platform targets fragmented customer, product, and policy information that...
ICE Seeks Industry Input on Ad Tech Location Data for Investigative Use
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has issued a Request for Information seeking commercial ad‑tech tools that provide location data and large‑scale analytics for investigative use. The RFI, framed as market research, asks vendors to demonstrate platforms that can ingest, correlate,...
Stripe Alumni Raise €30M Series A for Duna, Backed by Stripe and Adyen Execs
Duna, a business identity verification startup founded by Stripe alumni, closed a €30 million Series A round led by Alphabet’s CapitalG with participation from current and former Stripe and Adyen executives. The company’s platform aims to create a reusable digital passport for...
Tenable Pops After Blowout Earnings and Bullish 2026 Outlook
Tenable Holdings posted a strong fiscal fourth‑quarter, reporting adjusted earnings of $0.48 per share and revenue of $260.5 million, both surpassing analyst expectations. Year‑over‑year revenue grew 11% to $999.4 million, while calculated billings rose 8% to $327.8 million. The company added 502 new...
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SaasRise Mastermind Recap - Feb 4, 2026
The Feb 4 2026 SaasRise Mastermind session delivered a deep‑dive into the toughest hurdles SaaS CEOs face, from turning legacy software into scalable cloud services to crafting a focused enterprise go‑to‑market motion. Participants were urged to adopt infrastructure‑as‑code tools like Terraform, invest...
Show HN: Morph – Videos of AI Testing Your PR, Embedded in GitHub
Glance is an AI‑powered testing tool that reads a pull‑request diff and automatically determines which UI interactions to exercise. It runs the tests in managed or developer‑provided browsers and captures video recordings, screenshots, console errors, and network logs. All artifacts...
Turn Any Website Into a Live, Structured Data Feed
Meter launches a no‑code web‑scraping and change‑detection platform that lets users describe data extraction in plain English. The service runs scrapes every 15 minutes, bypasses major anti‑bot defenses, and rotates residential and datacenter proxies. Detected content changes trigger webhooks, delivering...
Former Workplace From Facebook Engineers Launch AI Startup Slashwork to Banish Teamwork Slop
Former Facebook Workplace engineers have launched Slashwork, an AI‑first enterprise collaboration platform, announcing a $3.5 million seed round led by 20VC. The team, which includes ex‑Workplace leaders and investors such as former Slack CTO Cal Henderson and Intercom co‑founder Des Traynor,...
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How to Set Up an Outbound Cold Email System for B2B Outreach in 2026
Cold email remains a viable B2B channel in 2026 when treated as a scalable infrastructure rather than a sporadic tactic. Companies calculate the required volume—often millions of messages annually—to achieve systematic market coverage, breaking it down to a few thousand...
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How to Sell a $5M ARR SaaS Firm
Reaching $5 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) marks a pivotal inflection point for SaaS founders. At this scale, buyers treat the company as a serious acquisition target, yet the firm remains too small for a full‑scale investment banker process. The article...
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How to Do Enterprise SaaS Sales
Enterprise SaaS sales is a distinct discipline, not a scaled‑up version of SMB selling. Founders must first determine whether they are replacing an existing solution or pursuing a first‑time buy, as this shapes the timeline and risk. Mapping the three...
Canadian Retailers Turn to Contact Intelligence Platforms to Source Specialized Talent Amid Workforce Shortage
Canadian retailers are increasingly deploying contact‑intelligence platforms to locate niche talent for e‑commerce, supply‑chain and analytics roles, a shift driven by a widening skills gap. The technology has slashed time‑to‑hire for technical positions by roughly 40 percent, while specialized roles...
BoldVoice Raises $21M Series A to Give a Billion Non-Native English Speakers Their Own AI Voice Coach
BoldVoice announced a $21 million Series A round led by Matrix, with participation from Flybridge, Xfund, Corazon Capital, Alumni Ventures, Umami Capital and Y Combinator. The AI‑powered voice‑coaching platform has surpassed five million downloads and generated $10 million in annual recurring revenue. Its proprietary speech...
I Made an Open-Source Juypter Alternative
more-compute is an open‑source, locally‑run Python notebook environment that mimics Jupyter, Marimo, and Google Colab. It stores notebooks as .py files with # %% cell markers and includes a built‑in converter to and from the traditional .ipynb format. Installation is supported...
Converge (YC S23) Is Hiring Product Engineers (NYC, In-Person)
Converge, a YC S23 startup, is hiring senior product engineers in New York to bolster its vertically integrated marketing data platform. Backed by $5.7 million in funding, the company already exceeds $1 M ARR with over 180 customers while operating a six‑person core...
Embedded Payments Give SaaS a Lifeline as AI Reshapes Workflows
AI-driven agentic systems are unsettling traditional SaaS subscription models, prompting a sharp sell‑off that saw software indexes tumble over 14% and marquee names like Thomson Reuters and Salesforce plunge double‑digit percentages. Investors fear that conversational AI could bypass entire application...
Microsoft's Copilot Chatbot Is Running Into Problems
Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot, the centerpiece of its AI‑first strategy, is encountering significant hurdles. Users and former staff cite confusing branding and poor interoperability with other Microsoft tools. Adoption among enterprise customers remains modest and is slipping relative to rivals like...
Voxtral Transcribe 2
Mistral AI today launched Voxtral Transcribe 2, a pair of next‑generation speech‑to‑text models: Voxtral Mini Transcribe V2 for batch processing and Voxtral Realtime for live transcription. The realtime model delivers sub‑200 ms latency with a 4 B‑parameter footprint and is released as open‑weights under...
Xurrent Names New CEO to Scale Its AI-Powered ITxM Platform
Xurrent announced Brian Wenngatz as its new chief executive officer, bringing experience scaling AI‑driven enterprise software after steering Sentera to a John Deere acquisition. The move follows Kevin McGibben's transition to executive chairman, ensuring continuity in strategic direction. Xurrent’s AI‑powered...
Dualboot Partners Achieves AWS Small and Medium Business Competency
Dualboot Partners announced it has earned the Amazon Web Services Small and Medium Business (SMB) Competency, a distinction that validates its expertise in helping smaller enterprises adopt cloud solutions. The award highlights Dualboot’s AI‑driven modernization accelerator, 3PO, which promises to...
Ataccama Sees Record Q4 Enterprise Wins as Data Trust Fuels AI
Ataccama reported record enterprise wins in Q4 2025, achieving a 30% compounded annual growth rate over the past three years. The company closed more than thirty $1 million-plus deals, while 75% of new customers adopted its generative AI capabilities as a...
Top 10 Investment Management Software Providers
The investment‑management software market is projected to grow from $8.5 billion in 2025 to $25.95 billion by 2035, reflecting an 11.8% CAGR. Regulatory pressure, rapid market swings, and client demand for transparent reporting have turned these platforms into core infrastructure. The article...
Collate Joins Industry Leaders to Advance OSI for Data and AI
Collate, the creator of the OpenMetadata project, announced its membership in the Open Semantic Interchange (OSI), a Snowflake‑led open‑source effort to define a vendor‑neutral semantic metadata specification. OSI seeks to harmonize fragmented data definitions across business intelligence, data governance, engineering,...
RingCentral Recognized as a Top Provider in Metrigy’s 2025 MetriStar UCaaS Report
RingCentral has been named a Top Provider in Metrigy’s 2025 MetriStar UCaaS Report, one of only three vendors to achieve this distinction. The company earned the highest overall customer sentiment score and outperformed peers in voice quality, security, value, analytics,...
The Payment Facilitator Model as a Growth Strategy for ISVs
The episode explores how the payment facilitator (PayFac) model is becoming a key growth engine for independent software vendors (ISVs) amid the rise of SaaS, AI, and embedded finance. It highlights the superior merchant experience PayFacs deliver—simplified onboarding, ongoing risk...
BPX Optimizes Resource Utilization with WalkMe’s Software Usage Analytics and Process Intelligence
BPX, a global process‑consulting firm, has integrated WalkMe’s Software Usage Analytics and Process Intelligence into its service portfolio. The platform provides real‑time visibility into how employees interact with enterprise applications, exposing usage patterns and workflow bottlenecks. Leveraging these insights, BPX...
