Startup News - Demandbase and Spiffy receive new funding
Demandbase, Spiffy Receive Fresh Funding
As businesses, Demandbase and Spiffy have little in common.
San Francisco-based Demandbase provides sales and marketing support to B2B companies. And North Carolina-based Spiffy sends out a fleet of vans to offices and homes that provide automobile owners with services such as oil changes and detailing. But in the past two weeks, both privately-held firms have received fresh injections of funds.
Demandbase, which was valued at $1.33 billion as of May 2021, recently announced $175 million in new financing from Vista Credit Partners, a subsidiary of Vista Equity Partners. The investment will be used strategically to support Demandbase's next wave of platform innovation. “This comes on the heels of a successful Q4 and FY2022, including strong revenue growth and record Q4 bookings,” the company announced in a press release.
And Spiffy announced the closing of its Series C financing round, raising $30 million to drive growth across the business and fuel Spiffy’s private-label hardware and software-as-a-service offering for automotive dealers. The round was led by Edison Partners, with participation from existing investors including Tribeca Venture Partners, Bull City Venture Partners, IDEA Fund Partners, and Trog Hawley Capital. The latest funding brings the company’s valuation to $133 million as of February 2023.
According to a profile on Spiffy in The News & Observer, based in Raleigh, N.C., Spiffy now has 500 technicians across 45 markets, and an additional 80 employees at its Durham, N.C. headquarters. The company says it performs between 3,000 to 4,000 services each day and has grown by more than 90% in each of the past two years. This expansion has been powered, in part, by the company’s focus on servicing larger fleets of commercial vehicles like those at rental car agencies.
FoodTech Wonder Pivots to Meal Deliveries
Meanwhile, Wonder, a five-year-old food-tech startup launched by tech entrepreneur Marc Lore, has completely revamped the way it does business and residents of Manhattan may be the better for it.
According to a profile on the Business Insider website, Wonder, which was valued at $3.5 billion as of June 2022, originally “prepared meals in vans parked outside customers' homes in New Jersey but is pivoting to delivering meals from storefronts using couriers on electric bikes.” The company launched its new service from a storefront on the Upper West Side of Manhattan this week.
In an interview with Business Insider, Lore, who started e-commerce site Jet.com in 2014 before selling it to Walmart two years later, said that by shifting Wonder’s business model to delivery or takeout from a fixed location, Wonder can scale faster. “Storefronts can offer consumers up to 30 food brands for delivery from one location, while the van model was limited to two menus per van,” the article stated.
Jasper Hosts First Generative AI Conference
Finally, in a further sign that generative AI has arrived, the hot tech sector finally got its first trade conference in mid-February. According to an article on the CNBC website, a crowd of over 1,000 people including executives with OpenAI and Anthropic and venture capitalists attended the conference in San Francisco hosted by Jasper, a generative AI startup that has raised over $140 million. “The tech industry may seem like it’s in a lull, plagued by widespread layoffs at major tech companies and a down economy, but that air of doom wasn’t apparent at a gathering of [AI] techies and investors,” wrote CNBC.
