Enterprise messaging service Slack is raising a $250 million round at a $5 billion valuation, TechCrunch has confirmed. We’re hearing that SoftBank, Accel Partners and other existing investors participated.
The $250 million financing amount was reported by Bloomberg. Axios first had the names of the lead investors. Recode originally reported on a $500 million round last month, but… Read More

 OpenText, the content management company based in Waterloo, Ontario announced today that it was buying Guidance Software, a forensic security and eDiscovery vendor for $240 million.
OpenText agreed to pay Guidance shareholders $7.10 a share. The price will be less Guidance’s cash on hand of approximately $18 million, making the final price just around $222 million, according to OpenText. Read More

 Barely a day passes without some news about containers and that speaks to how quickly this technology is being adopted by developers and the platforms and startups that serve them. Today it’s Microsoft’s turn to launch a new container service for its Azure cloud computing platform: Azure Container Instances (ACI). The company also today announced that it is joining the Cloud… Read More

 British enterprise software company Sage Group has agreed to purchase Intacct, a 19-year-old accounting software company, for $850 million, the companies announced today. A cash and stock transaction, the deal aims to help build out Sage’s cloud financial management offerings. Read More

 Big data analytics — where vast troves of information are structured and used to help businesses gain more insights into their operations and customers, to develop new products, and to run more efficiently — are a cornerstone of how many tech-centric enterprises run their businesses today. Now the focus is on building solutions that the rest of the enterprise world can use, even if… Read More

 HubSpot is announcing that it has acquired Kemvi, a startup applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to help sales teams. A few months ago, Kemvi launched DeepGraph, a product that analyzes public data so that salespeople can identify the best time (say, after a job change or the publication of an article) to reach out to potential customers. It also proactively reaches out to… Read More

 Big data analytics — where vast troves of information are structured and used to help businesses gain more insights into their operations and customers, to develop new products, and to run more efficiently — are a cornerstone of how many tech-centric enterprises run their businesses today. Now the focus is on building solutions that the rest of the enterprise world can use, even if… Read More

 Companies are increasingly dependant on digital platforms for their business growth, and that is giving a boost to analytics businesses that are helping them make better sense of that digital landscape. SimilarWeb — which offers analytics and insights about the performance of websites and apps, as well as competitive intelligence about how other apps and sites are doing (covering 80… Read More

 Restaurant owners have a lot of responsibilities and a wide array of skills to handle those responsibilities. That said, building a website isn’t usually within that skill-set. That’s where BentoBox comes in. The company, which helps restaurant owners quickly build full-featured websites for their restaurants, has just closed a $4.8 million Series A funding round. The round was led… Read More

 Big data analytics continues to be a key driver in how organizations utilise their vast quantities of information to run their businesses, and now a startup that has built a big data platform specifically focusing on data from the public sector has raised a round of funding.
LiveStories, a Seattle-based company that works with governments, education institutions and other public entities to… Read More