Here’s their review of the week. Aussie firsts, deals and shpiels
Consolidating insights. Sydney-based Hyper Anna is being  acquired by Alteryx , a US$5bn NYSE-listed analytics automation company. Founded in 2015 by data scientist Natalie Nguyen, Hyper Anna’s AI powered data platform (‘Anna’​) proactively scans data and presents insights to users in real time. We don’t know the price tag yet. Hyper Anna’s customers include some solid logos such as Westpac, nbn, Microsoft, IAG and SingTel. Interestingly, the startup hasn’t announced any funding since 2017, when Sequoia China led a $16m round (AirTree and Westpac’s Reinventure also invested). Employee numbers reported on LinkedIn have also been fairly stable over the last few years. Together, this hints that the sale price will be at the modest, rather than unicorn, end of the spectrum. The acquisition is just the latest example of bigger analytics vendors extending their capabilities by gobbling up smaller players. On the same day,  insightsoftware acquired Exago . Last week,  Qlik acquired Big Squid  and  Vista Equity Partners bought Blue Prism  to merge with Tibco. Culture Geek party. Melbourne-based employee experience unicorn Culture Amp is  acquiring Disco . Disco helps foster team appreciation and engagement by prompting employees to give kudos and nominating each other for living the values. This is Culture Amp’s second acquisition – it acquired performance management system Zugata in 2019. A week of firsts:
Australia’s first Space Weather Hub is being set up by  the Bureau of Meteorology  in Aussie’s irrefutable space city, Adelaide. Also based there: Australian Space Agency, SmartSat CRC, the Space Discovery Centre, Microsoft Azure Space, the South Australian Space Industry Centre, Inovor Technologies and Myriota. Canva was the first Aussie company to  sign Amazon’s Climate Pledge  to hit net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. Australia’s first  NFT Fest  took place last week, with 50 speakers from across the world discussing the blockchain and crypto space. Access recordings  here . Good news for underbanked, cash-strapped SMBs. Melbourne-based SMB lender  Timelio secured a $270m facility  from Goldman Sachs. Timelio’s technology assesses the risk of a SMB’s debtors and lends against unpaid invoices. Over the past six months, customer demand has grown 15% MoM and the average customer funding requirement has increased from $250k in 2017 to $1m. Work models. Creative marketplace Envato has switched to nine-day fortnights in the lead up to Christmas. Around the world, companies are embracing ‘new normal’ work models. This week PwC announced it is allowing all its 40,000 US workers to  work from anywhere ; remote work tool Notion announced a  $10bn valuation  off the back of big growth; and Eidos-Montréal (the Canadian video game developer behind Guardians of the Galaxy), announced it will move to a  four-day workweek . Hang ten on the Tidal wave. VC  Tidal Ventures launched an expert investment network , Tidal’s Expert Network (#ten), pooling big wigs from the likes of Uber, Xplor and Airbnb. Similar to Startmate’s model, members invest in Tidal’s Seed Fund, while offering founders mentorship or expertise. Cabinet: “LMFAO! Everyday I’m shufflin”. The revolving door of cabinet continues to get a work out. The  Industry, Science and Technology portfolio has been split  between Angus Taylor (holding on to Industry) and Melissa Price (taking over Science and Technology and retaining her defence portfolio). The move has been cautiously welcomed. Local funding news
Trend of the week: legal tech
Smokeball  raised USD$30m  ($41m) for its legal practice management software that also offers document automation, matter management and time tracking. Get them billables. Persuit raised  US$20 million  ($27.4m) led by Boston-based OpenView. Founded by former DLA Piper partner Jim Delkousis, Persuit is a private marketplace for corporate legal services. Delkousis says Persuit helps in-house teams to get “true market pricing” and efficiently find the best lawyer for the job. 3ME Technology Holdings raised a $15m convertible note from the Australian Business Growth Fund (a public-private partnership). 3ME has developed a scalable lithium-ion battery system that can be retrofitted to powerful diesel engines. EncompaaS  raised $14m  for its suite of cloud-based enterprise content management and compliance tools. Lawpath  raised $7.5m  for its subscription-based legal services platform. It plans to expand into NZ and Southeast Asia. Lawpath currently has about 230,000 users, and says it is used to help form 5% of new companies in Australia. Pathzero  raised US$5m  ($6.8m) led by Carthona. Pathzero provides an accessible way of measuring corporate carbon emissions, implementing an emissions reduction plan, purchasing verified carbon credits and disclosing carbon emissions information publicly. Academy Xi  raised $4.4m  from NZ’s Milford Asset Management (extending its current round to $14m). The company delivers both individual and corporate training programs, focused on helping close the digital skills gap across the local workforce. ProcurePro  raised $2.6m  to helps construction firms manage subcontractors. GreaseBoss  raised $2.5m  from investors including 49ers footballer “the Comeback Kid”, Joe Montana after a stint in Y Combinator this year. GreaseBoss’ IoT tech aims to eliminate lubrication failure in commercial machinery. Conqa  raised NZ$2.5m+  from existing investors for its construction QA software. mDetect  received a $1.5m  government grant to commercialise its solution for one of the most dangerous problems in mining –  tailing dams . Oz Hair & Beauty  raised an undisclosed amount  from Daniel Agostinelli (CEO of Accent Group – Platypus, Style Runner, Glue Store, Vans), billionaire businessman, Brett Blundy and others. The online retailer, was founded by brothers Anthony and Guy Nappa ten years ago and currently has a turnover of $40 million (up 68% in the 12 months ending June 30). Hacks, whistleblowing and biiiig booboos
October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Let’s all celebrate by changing our passwords! *Ahem*, particularly if you’re a Twitch or Coinbase user…
Vlad’s hackers. Microsoft says  US government agencies are being targeted at a greater rate by Russian cyberattacks than ever before. Nearly 60% of the cyberattacks it has tracked over the past year came from Russian state–sponsored hackers, and those attacks are also becoming more sophisticated and successful. Twitch’s glitch. The interactive streaming service popular with gamers, Twitch, has been criticised for being slow to announce a  data breach . Hacker(s) leaked closely guarded information about Twitch’s streamer earnings (top-five earners grossed about US$35m between them from August 2019 to October 2021), along with its source code and technical details for future products. The Amazon-owned company has recently been struggling to moderate ongoing hate and harassment, leading users to start a #DoBetterTwitch movement. The anonymous leaker used this hashtag to distributed the hacked data. Hacking the crypty bank. If you’re deep into crypto you may recall that exchange platform, Coinbase, was hacked back in March and May 2020. Now the chickens have come home to roost. It has been revealed  hackers stole from 6,000 accounts . Don’t fret. Coinbase is allegedly coming to the rescue, working with customers to “regain control of their accounts and reimburse them for funds they lost.” Might be a bit harder to reimburse them for love lost, though. Biggest blunder. Decentralised finance staking protocol Compound Labs  accidentally gave away US$90.1m  to its users in crypto tokens after upgrading its system. The founder politely asked that the money be returned… or recipients risk being reported to the IRS as income received. Good luck with that, guys. Facebook’s sorry, not sorry. Zuck pulled a Scomo, preferring to go on holiday instead of facing the music this week. Facebook kicked off the week with a  six-hour outage  and ended with  whistleblower  Frances Haugen claiming Facebook has long known about the harm its services cause to kids. A place to blow whistles. The revelations from Haugen have brought whistleblowing back into sharp focus. Whistleblower Ifeoma Ozoma, who  spoke out against Pinterest  on issues of racial and gender-based discrimination last year, launched the  Tech Worker Handbook  – a safe place for whistleblowers. Ozoma says the timing was fortuitous, but  not intentional . Tesla’s ugly side. Lastly on the chopping block we have Tesla, which has been ordered to pay US $137m in damages  to a former employee in a racial harassment lawsuit. The counts against the company are really, really ugly. Over 100 potential litigants are seeking to make similar claims that they were regularly called the “n” word, subject to racist slurs and graffiti (eg swastikas) on bathroom walls and generally treated differently because of their race. Meanwhile Tesla has been busy  exceeding Wall Street’s projections , delivering 241,300 vehicles in Q3. All in all, not Big Tech’s finest week. That’s a wrap! We hope you enjoyed it. Bex, Gavin and the team at Ignition Lane

Ignition Lane’s Weekly Wrap: Big tech’s shocker, merger mania, a big week of firsts and the VC Tidal wave

Message :
San Francisco,  CA, Jan.  30, 2019  (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --
Culture Amp, the Culture First employee feedback company, is continuing to create a better world of work with today’s announcement of acquiring award-winning performance management firm, Zugata. Zugata, a recipient of the Gartner 2018 Cool Vendors in Human Capital Management Awards, has had a laser focus on redefining performance management for over 1,000 organizations to date. Culture Amp’s easy-to-use feedback platform sits atop a sophisticated machine learning engine that allows organizations to tap into the collective intelligence of over 2,000 culture-first companies and what those companies have learned from collecting, understanding and acting on the experience and perspectives of their people over 100 million times to date. After pioneering real-time employee engagement feedback this acquisition allows Culture Amp to bring an increasingly sophisticated use of data across the employee lifecycle. “The market for employee engagement and feedback tools is exploding with growth,” said Josh Bersin, Global Industry Analyst and Founder, Bersin by Deloitte. “This acquisition connects industry leading engagement surveys with AI and peer-to-peer feedback, giving companies a new solution for development, coaching, and continuous performance improvement.”
Didier Elzinga, CEO and co-founder of Culture Amp, stated “One of our core values at Culture Amp is to learn faster through feedback. By acquiring Zugata we are adding a deep and rich set of performance and development tools that allow our customers to not only see what is going on with their people and culture at every level, and in every moment, but to connect all of that information into a rich tapestry that helps them not just know, but to take action.”
Srinivas Krishnamurti, former CEO of Zugata and now Director of Product, Performance at Culture Amp, added, “Together we are the only global company that can connect the dots under one integrated solution at scale. While other providers are checking the same boxes of engagement and performance, we are in the unique position of combining two established best in industry providers with an unrivaled amount of shared intelligence, having worked with more than 3,000 businesses between us.”
Industry followers and customers consider this acquisition and how Culture Amp is leading the conversation within the category to be a groundbreaking development for advancing the future of managing people analytics and ultimately improving workplace dynamics. Mark Frein, Chief People Officer of InVision, shared his excitement over the announcement, “As current Culture Amp and Zugata customers, we are thrilled to see the combination of the best engagement platform and the best performance platform on the HR tech market. There are deep veins of people data to mine in the links between performance and engagement,” Frein continued. “We are excited to see how the two products evolve and merge to provide deeper insights by way of combining these complementary areas of HR practice.”
A shared vision about the future of work
Both Elzinga and Krishnamurti agree that beyond the tactical business reasons for the acquisition, the two companies’ shared goals, values, and culture made the decision easy. “When it came down to making a decision, we saw natural alignment across the mission and values of both companies, and a shared vision for what could be when we could connect all the data we have at our disposal,” Elzinga said. Customers and prospects who are interested in adding a performance management solution to their people and culture ecosystem can contact Culture Amp at https://www.cultureamp.com/products/performance . To learn more about Culture Amp’s vision for the future of work, visit  http://bit.ly/2GbVYkJ . ###
About Culture Amp
Culture Amp is the Culture First employee feedback company. We make it easy to collect, understand, and act on employee feedback, enabling organizations to better manage the employee experience and turn company culture into a competitive advantage. Culture Amp is a certified B Corporation used by more than 2,000 Culture First companies, including Airbnb, Lyft, KIND Snacks, Mercy Health, Salesforce, Slack and McDonald’s. Started in Melbourne with offices in San Francisco, London, and New York, Culture Amp is the world’s largest independent employee feedback company and has raised $76.3M USD from Index Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Sapphire Ventures and Blackbird Ventures. Learn more at cultureamp.com and @CultureAmp. Photos and interviews available by request. Attachments

CULTURE AMP ACQUIRES ZUGATA

CULTURE AMP HELPS COMPANIES BRIDGE THE GAP FROM KNOWLEDGE TO ACTION BY ADDING ZUGATA’S CONTINUOUS PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT CAPABILITY TO THEIR BEST-IN-CLASS EMPLOYEE FEEDBACK PLATFORM
| Source: Culture Amp
San Francisco,  CA, Jan.  30, 2019  (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --
Culture Amp, the Culture First employee feedback company, is continuing to create a better world of work with today’s announcement of acquiring award-winning performance management firm, Zugata. Zugata, a recipient of the Gartner 2018 Cool Vendors in Human Capital Management Awards, has had a laser focus on redefining performance management for over 1,000 organizations to date. Culture Amp’s easy-to-use feedback platform sits atop a sophisticated machine learning engine that allows organizations to tap into the collective intelligence of over 2,000 culture-first companies and what those companies have learned from collecting, understanding and acting on the experience and perspectives of their people over 100 million times to date. After pioneering real-time employee engagement feedback this acquisition allows Culture Amp to bring an increasingly sophisticated use of data across the employee lifecycle. “The market for employee engagement and feedback tools is exploding with growth,” said Josh Bersin, Global Industry Analyst and Founder, Bersin by Deloitte. “This acquisition connects industry leading engagement surveys with AI and peer-to-peer feedback, giving companies a new solution for development, coaching, and continuous performance improvement.”
Didier Elzinga, CEO and co-founder of Culture Amp, stated “One of our core values at Culture Amp is to learn faster through feedback. By acquiring Zugata we are adding a deep and rich set of performance and development tools that allow our customers to not only see what is going on with their people and culture at every level, and in every moment, but to connect all of that information into a rich tapestry that helps them not just know, but to take action.”
Srinivas Krishnamurti, former CEO of Zugata and now Director of Product, Performance at Culture Amp, added, “Together we are the only global company that can connect the dots under one integrated solution at scale. While other providers are checking the same boxes of engagement and performance, we are in the unique position of combining two established best in industry providers with an unrivaled amount of shared intelligence, having worked with more than 3,000 businesses between us.”
Industry followers and customers consider this acquisition and how Culture Amp is leading the conversation within the category to be a groundbreaking development for advancing the future of managing people analytics and ultimately improving workplace dynamics. Mark Frein, Chief People Officer of InVision, shared his excitement over the announcement, “As current Culture Amp and Zugata customers, we are thrilled to see the combination of the best engagement platform and the best performance platform on the HR tech market. There are deep veins of people data to mine in the links between performance and engagement,” Frein continued. “We are excited to see how the two products evolve and merge to provide deeper insights by way of combining these complementary areas of HR practice.”
A shared vision about the future of work
Both Elzinga and Krishnamurti agree that beyond the tactical business reasons for the acquisition, the two companies’ shared goals, values, and culture made the decision easy. “When it came down to making a decision, we saw natural alignment across the mission and values of both companies, and a shared vision for what could be when we could connect all the data we have at our disposal,” Elzinga said. Customers and prospects who are interested in adding a performance management solution to their people and culture ecosystem can contact Culture Amp at https://www.cultureamp.com/products/performance . To learn more about Culture Amp’s vision for the future of work, visit  http://bit.ly/2GbVYkJ . ###
About Culture Amp
Culture Amp is the Culture First employee feedback company. We make it easy to collect, understand, and act on employee feedback, enabling organizations to better manage the employee experience and turn company culture into a competitive advantage. Culture Amp is a certified B Corporation used by more than 2,000 Culture First companies, including Airbnb, Lyft, KIND Snacks, Mercy Health, Salesforce, Slack and McDonald’s. Started in Melbourne with offices in San Francisco, London, and New York, Culture Amp is the world’s largest independent employee feedback company and has raised $76.3M USD from Index Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Sapphire Ventures and Blackbird Ventures. Learn more at cultureamp.com and @CultureAmp. Photos and interviews available by request. Attachments

Companies Selected for the “Cool Vendors” Report are Innovative, Impactful and Intriguing
May 14, 2018 12:30
ET | Source: Zugata
PALO ALTO, Calif., May  14, 2018  (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Zugata, the performance management software company that helps organizations build high-performance cultures, today announced that it has been recognized in the "Cool Vendors in the Human Capital Management Applying AI”1 report by Gartner, Inc.
As Gartner stated in the report, “This report identifies a common theme of solution providers applying AI to innovate across many HCM processes. Application leaders responsible for transforming HCM should consider these vendors for advancing key organizational initiatives such as engagement, experience and inclusion.”
Zugata was founded in December 2014 with a vision to use data to understand employees and to use those insights to empower employees to reach their fullest potential. Zugata uses machine learning to help companies drive both individual and organizational performance. At the employee level, Zugata uses AI to conduct a social network analysis for each individual. Because the technology knows which employees work together most, it can automate the feedback request process, providing employees with timely and useful information. Zugata then delivers personalized development resources based on this data. In addition, Zugata recently introduced Zugata Insights, AI-powered analytics to measure, monitor and improve organizational performance. Examples of this include measuring unconscious bias through the different ways employees are described in feedback and reviews and managing a culture gap index by comparing a company’s published values with the ones they reward in top performers. "We’ve designed Zugata for the modern world of work, and we consider our inclusion in the Cool Vendor Report by Gartner a confirmation of this,” said Srinivas Krishnamurti, co-founder and CEO of Zugata. “Today's organizations are fast-paced, agile and a network of teams. In this environment, yesterday’s processes and systems break. Through our use of AI, Zugata is built for the way work gets done today, helping companies build and sustain high-performance cultures.”
About Zugata
Zugata was founded in 2014 with a vision to use data to empower employees and organizations to reach their fullest potential. Its innovative mobile-first solution makes it possible for employees to receive continuous feedback from the people they work with, along with personalized development resources, so they can constantly improve and reach their true potential. Its AI-powered analytics help companies improve organizational performance to drive business success. Zugata is based in Palo Alto, CA and is backed by Canaan Partners, General Catalyst, Formation 8, Redpoint Ventures and Silicon Valley angel investors. For more information, go to https://www.zugata.com or follow Zugata on Twitter @ZugataInc. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. Media and Analyst Contact:

Zugata Named a Cool Vendor in Human Capital Management Applying AI by Gartner

May 01, 2018 12:32
ET | Source: Zugata
PALO ALTO, Calif., May  01, 2018  (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Zugata, the performance management software company that helps organizations build high-performance cultures, today announced it is joining the corporate affiliate program of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research to improve diversity and inclusion practices in the workplace. Diversity and inclusion play a large role in creating a high-performance culture. According to Deloitte , organizations with inclusive cultures are 8 times more likely to achieve better business outcomes. Their research also shows that organizations with inclusive leadership have a 17% increase in team performance, a 20% increase in decision-making quality, and a 29% increase in team collaboration. By joining the Clayman Institute’s corporate affiliate program, Zugata is better equipped to help organizations thrive by creating an inclusive and fair environment for all genders where employees not only feel safe and supported, but also have equal opportunities for growth. Zugata has developed several product features to mitigate bias in employee feedback and performance evaluations. Currently, Zugata offers research-based templates that reduce unconscious bias and surfaces inconsistent feedback across genders. Zugata will leverage The Clayman Institute’s research insights and resources to promote better diversity and inclusion practices. “Providing an inclusive work environment without gender bias isn’t just good for business, it’s a moral imperative,” said Srinivas Krishnamurti, co-founder and CEO of Zugata. “We are excited to participate as a corporate affiliate of The Clayman Institute, benefitting from the latest research in this important field. Their work will help us to better support our customers in creating cultures in which all employees perform at their best.”
Additional Resources
Is Personality Impacting Women’s Pay Day? The Role of Bias in Performance Feedback blog: https://blog.zugata.com/is-personality-impacting-womens-pay-day-the-role-of-bias-in-performance-feedback
About Zugata
Zugata was founded in 2014 with a vision to use data to empower employees and organizations to reach their fullest potential. Its innovative mobile-first solution makes it possible for employees to receive continuous feedback from the people they work with, along with personalized development resources, so they can constantly improve and reach their true potential. Its AI-powered analytics help companies improve organizational performance to drive business success. Zugata is based in Palo Alto, CA and is backed by Canaan Partners, General Catalyst, Formation 8, Redpoint Ventures, and Silicon Valley angel investors. For more information, go to https://www.zugata.com or follow Zugata on Twitter @ZugataInc. Media and Analyst Contact:

Zugata Incorporates Gender Bias Research in Performance Management Software to Promote Better Diversity and Inclusion Practices

Skillshare is a global online educational marketplace to learn anything, from anyone. Skillshare offers a platform for users to offer real-world classes of any kind to interested students.

Skillshare

With the partnership with Skillshare , Zugata now delivers targeted and personalized Skillshare course recommendations to employees based on feedback and performance data .

Zugata Partners With Skillshare and The Muse to Help Companies Deliver Personalized Professional Development

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 HR tech startups are helping companies manage critical pain points in HR processes such as recruitment, automation, career development, compensation, and benefits management, through a mix of software and services.

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Zugata was founded in 2014 with a vision to use data to empower employees to reach their fullest potential. Its mobile-first solution makes it possible for employees to receive continuous feedback from the people they work with, along with mentor recommendations, so they can constantly improve and reach their true potential. At the same time, Zugata enables companies to better understand team and organization skills to drive effective learning and development programs.

Name	Work History	Title	Status
Srinivas Krishnamurti		Chief Executive Officer	Current
Philippe Van Nuijs		Chief Technology Officer	Current

Name	Srinivas Krishnamurti	Philippe Van Nuijs
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Title	Chief Executive Officer	Chief Technology Officer
Status	Current	Current

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