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LONDON, England — February 3, 2021
Provar, the leading test automation platform for Salesforce worldwide, today announced the closing of $17 million in Series A funding led with an investment from Kennet Partners, an international growth equity firm whose portfolio includes high-growth companies in Europe and North America. This growth investment supports Provar’s ongoing mission to help teams capitalize on their Salesforce investment with a robust and scalable solution designed to improve release agility, drive down system errors and advance innovation.
As part of this investment for expansion, Michael Elias, managing director and founder of Kennet Partners, will join the Provar board of directors. In addition, Bob DeSantis, a current board member with extensive experience steering high-growth companies within the Salesforce ecosystem, will now serve as the chairman.
“At Kennet, we focus on bootstrapped B2B SaaS companies with a strong and satisfied customer base,” said Michael Elias, managing director at Kennet Partners. “In addition to fitting this criteria, Provar has a culture of integrity and customer focus that makes them especially appealing to us. The demand for software-driven automation has increased dramatically as part of the broader digital transformation that is being accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic and our funding will allow Provar to continue to scale and innovate.”
Companies are increasingly investing in their approach to customer relationship management globally and leaning heavily into platforms like Salesforce to make data-driven decisions, operationalize best practices, unite distributed teams and forge deeper connections with customers to help facilitate growth. This shift has rapidly accelerated the need for teams to build, test and deploy customized Salesforce enhancements and functionality exponentially faster while eliminating risk.
“Customers are hungry for a Salesforce-centric test automation solution that can create break-resistant tests, release after release, while also extending into integrated systems when needed,” said Geraint Waters, co-founder and chief executive officer at Provar. “Given the accelerated demand for Salesforce release deployments and the tools connected to them, traditional methods that require an excruciating amount of test maintenance just aren’t feasible anymore. That’s why Provar is designed to fill that gap using an intelligent metadata-driven model.”
Since launching Provar seven years ago, the company has organically grown its customer base worldwide and opened offices in the U.K., North America and India. With the new funding, Provar plans to invest further in its test automation platform, expand operations, scale the team globally and broaden the virtually limitless possibilities of Salesforce test automation.
Bromsgrove-based Rimilia, which works with the likes of Disney and HSBC, has raised millions for its technology that automates payments
A British fintech firm which uses artificial intelligence to automate payments has raised $15m (£11.5m) from investors as it looks to fuel the growth of its business.
Rimilia, a fintech firm founded in Bromsgrove in 2008, has raised money in a growth round involving a string of existing investors, including Eight Road Ventures, a London-headquartered venture capital firm that was an early backer in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, Silicon Valley Bank and Kennet Partners.
The company uses artificial intelligence to help clients speed up the usually laborious and manual work required to process payments from customers. In 2019, its technology help automate the collection of £110bn.
According to Kevin Kimber, chief executive of Rimilia, whose fintech start-up works with the likes of Disney, HSBC and Royal Mail, many companies spend months collecting cash from customers, leaving them millions of pounds out of pocket for longer than necessary.
“We're helping these businesses automate their accounts receivable function so fundamentally how they get paid,” he said.
“Typically these large global corporates are still largely managing this process manually with spreadsheets and so there's very little predictability or control.”
Mr Kimber has previously worked to scale technology businesses having taken ServiceNow, a US cloud computing firm, to the public markets at a $4bn valuation in June 2012.
The float in New York was the first major initial public offering by a technology company after Facebook’s listing in May 2012. The company now has a $60bn market capitalisation.
The fintech chief executive, who joined the firm in 2018, said companies are searching for ways to free up staff from “fairly mundane and manual tasks that we as humans don't want to deal with”.
The company currently has offices in the UK, US and Canada and hires around more than 140 people.
Full Article: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/02/03/british-fintech-firm-rimilia-raises-15m-boost-ai-payments-business/
Codility, a platform that helps tech recruiters and hiring managers asses candidates through online coding tests, today announced that it has raised a $22 million Series A round led by Oxx and Kennet Partners.
This marks the first time Codility has raised any funding, after 10 years as a bootstrapped company. Clearly, though, despite having achieved double-digit annual recurring revenue in those 10 years, the team now believes that it has an opportunity to grow its market share in what is becoming a more competitive market for tech hiring platforms — and to do so, it needs outside funding.
So far, the company has brought on an impressive list of customers, including Microsoft, Tesla, Slack, Okta, Rakuten, American Express and UnitedHealth Group. In total, the company says it had 1,500 customers in 2019 and helped them evaluate more than 450,000 candidates, a number the company says has grown over 50% year-over-year.
What sets Codility apart from similar platforms is that it aims to provide coding tests that are closer to what engineers typically face in their day-to-day jobs instead of highly abstract whiteboarding sessions that evaluate their theory of algorithms knowledge.
“The biggest bottleneck to achieving this lies in sourcing, screening and interviewing,” said Codility CEO Natalia Panowicz. “This is where Codility comes in. We allow businesses to deliver great experiences to candidates and deep insights to the hiring team — improving decision-making and ultimately increasing their overall engineering capacity.”
The company says its system allows it to provide recruiters with a “360-degree evaluation of technical ability” that helps managers ensure that a candidate is a good fit for a given position. Ideally, this also reduces the effect of unconscious bias in the recruiting and placement process.
As part of its platform, Codility offers its technical skills and evaluation services for recruiters, including a shared editor for live technical interviews. In addition, the company also helps companies run their own coding competitions, which they can then use to identify potential candidates, including those who aren’t actively looking for a new job.“Codility is a great solution for hiring teams based on the needs of quality high-volume hiring; such as consistency, standardization and scalability,” said Vicky Xiong, senior director of Engineering at Okta . “Codility also enables Okta to create a great candidate experience, which is core to our values as a company.”
Full press release: https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/30/codility-raises-22m-for-its-tech-recruiting-platform/
Leading field force data intelligence software platform provider to leverage funds to advance product development, sales and marketing, and market penetration; Jim Grady appointed CEO to lead global growth and expansion
St. Petersburg, FL -- January 6, 2020– Spatial Networks, the creator of Fulcrum, the leading geospatial data collection and analysis platform for field operations, today announced that is has closed an investment of $42.5 million led by Kayne Partners, the growth equity group of Kayne Anderson Capital Advisors, L.P., and Kennet Partners, Ltd. The funding will primarily be used to scale the Company’s sales and marketing capabilities, accelerate its product development roadmap, and further expand the Fulcrum data collection platform into international markets. The company has appointed Jim Grady CEO to oversee all aspects of the company’s strategy and execution globally.
Spatial Networks drives digital transformation of field workforces via Fulcrum, an AI-powered data collection platform for commercial field workers. A market leading platform built on multiple decades of expertise in mobile field data collection and geospatial analytics with adoption by more than 30,000 users and 2100 customers in field-intensive industries such as utilities, construction, environmental services, engineering, Fulcrum optimizes field operations by enabling rapid deployment of mobile applications using a low-code development environment. Using Fulcrum, field workers can rapidly gather a vast range of data types, including audio and video, using user-built forms with geotagging capabilities. Key decision-makers gain real time insights into field operations efficiency and performance through visualization, quality assurance and data management tools, and flexible reporting.
With the completion of the deal, Jim Grady will assume the role of CEO, effective immediately. Grady brings more than twenty-five years of general management and leadership experience in high growth technology companies to Spatial Networks. As CEO of Cellebrite, Inc., a leading provider of cyber/digital intelligence software solutions–including mobile phone forensic extraction and AI-driven analytics product lines–for law enforcement, enterprise, & intelligence sectors, Grady scaled revenue from $5M to $100M while consistently expanding profit margins.
“Spatial Networks is uniquely positioned to transform the way organizations deploy and manage field workforces to better deliver superior customer experiences while increasing efficiency and profitability,” said Jim Grady, CEO, Spatial Networks “I look forward to building on the company’s impressive product and market position as we deliver even greater insight and workflow automation through next generation innovations that harness AI, low code-no code deployment, geospatial data collection and analytics, and an advanced reporting engine to establish Fulcrum as the industry’s dominant field force data intelligence platform.”
Nate Locke of Kayne Partners commented, “We are thoroughly impressed by Spatial Networks’ rapid growth and user adoption. The Company provides incredible value both for users in the field who now have a streamlined, robust data collection process, and for decision-makers who now have access to contextually relevant information and geospatial insights.”
“We are excited about the potential of Spatial Networks to build on its core capabilities in workflow automation, no code development and geospatial data to optimize field work forces using AI in a broad range of markets”, said Javier Rojas, Managing Partner, Kennet Partners. “We believe the combination of Spatial’s founding team, executives from Jim’s prior successes and Jim’s leadership will enable the company to scale rapidly and build a category leader.”
London, UK 3 January 2020.
Receipt Bank, the world’s leading digital bookkeeping platform, has raised $73.1 million (£55 million) in a successful Series C funding round. The round was led by Insight Partners, joined by Augmentum Fintech with participation from existing investors Kennet Partners and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC), and advised by Harris Williams.
The funds will be used to continue expansion in Europe, Australia and North America, and build on Receipt Bank’s award-winning product suite.
The company doubled customers in 2019, taking the total number of businesses using the platform to above 360,000.
Receipt Bank’s proprietary machine learning technology fetches financial information from multiple sources, digitises and categorises it, making it ready for accountants and bookkeepers, more than 50,000 of whom use the platform. The platform processes and stores 45 new fields of small business financial data every second from receipt photos, bank accounts, invoices and bills.
Receipt Bank CEO, Adrian Blair, commented: “This investment is an endorsement of our mission at Receipt Bank - to help millions of small businesses grow by getting control of their finances. Our machine learning technology enables accountants to do far more for their small business clients, and expands the market for professional advice by making accountants far more productive.
“The addition of Augmentum alongside our current investors, Insight, Kennet and CIBC, strengthens our board and will help us meet our ambitious growth goals, following a stellar 2019.”
Jason Ewell, Operating Partner at Insight Partners and Receipt Bank Board member, commented: “Receipt Bank continues to make giant leaps forward in machine learning technology. We are excited to see the company’s continued progress in the coming years.”
Tim Levene, CEO of Augmentum Fintech, said: “Digital bookkeeping allows all businesses to save time and expense and Receipt Bank's technology and growth make the company a clear leader in this sector.”
One of the fastest growing British technology companies, Receipt Bank automates bookkeeping to save businesses time and money on their taxes. The platform saves accountants one hour per client weekly and frees small business from 120 hours of annual financial admin.
Kennet Partners, the technology growth equity investor, has announced that it has appointed Jonathan Hewitson as Finance Director and Huan Jing Gan as a Director in the investment team.
Jonathan joins Kennet from Manzanita Capital, where he was Finance Director. Previously, he worked within the structuring & tax team at J Rothschild Capital Management, and at PWC where he qualified as a Chartered Accountant and worked within the Private Equity M&A tax team. Jonathan holds a BA (Hons) in Business Management from Newcastle University.
Huan Jing Gan ("Jing") joins Kennet from Kinnevik, where she was an Investment Professional in the Venture & Growth Investments team. Previously, she worked in the Investment Banking Division at Goldman Sachs within the London Telecom, Media & Technology team. Jing holds a BSc (Hons) degree in Business Management from Kings College London.
Michael Elias, Managing Director at Kennet, said: "We are thrilled to have Jonathan and Jing join our London-based investment group. With significant new capital for investment in Europe and the US, we will benefit from the experience that they both bring to our team."