Sequoia is a venture capital focused on energy, financial, enterprise, healthcare, internet, and mobile startups. The firm helps a small number of daring founders build legendary companies. It spurs them to push the boundaries of what’s possible. The firm seeks to invest in all sectors with a focus on energy, financials and financial services, healthcare and healthcare services, Internet, mobile, outsourcing, and technology.

Sequoia Capital

SoftBank Group provides venture funding and strategic support to exceptional entrepreneurs building disruptive enduring businesses. They are a small team of experienced entrepreneurs and investors who take an ''active'' approach to helping their companies reach their full potential. They manage $600 million across three funds and invest across a company’s lifecycle, from early to growth stages.   Through their close ties to a number of Asia’s leading mobile, internet and technology companies – including strategic partners SoftBank Corp, Yahoo! Japan and Alibaba Group – SoftBank Capital offers unique expertise to businesses seeking to address the Asian market.  Since 1995, SoftBank Capital has partnered with internet pioneers such as Criteo, Gilt Groupe, OMGPOP (Zynga), betaworks, BuzzFeed, Buddy Media (Salesforce.com), Huffington Post (AOL), Associated Content (Yahoo!), Danger (Microsoft), Geocities (Yahoo!), E*Trade and Yahoo!.

SoftBank Capital

Reuters is the world's leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals. They combine industry expertise with innovative technology to deliver critical information to leading decision makers in the financial, legal, tax & accounting, scientific, healthcare and media markets, powered by the world's most trusted news organization. RVC, the former venture capital arm of Reuters, was set up in 1994 and began investing RVC I (originally known as The Greenhouse Fund) in Palo Alto, California in 1995. In 1997, RVC expanded the focus of its operations to Europe, bringing its significant Silicon Valley experience to a market with relatively few venture capitalists focused on early stage information technology companies. In September 2001, RVC became independent from Reuters and is now wholly owned by its Investment Partners and Chairman. It was awarded the contract to continue managing RVC I on behalf of Reuters. In establishing its investment independence, RVC has retained its strong relationships with Reuters, its affiliates (Tibco, Factiva, Instinet, Radianz) and its customers, which are primarily financial services and media companies who were amongst the first to be impacted by and adopt new technology. Building on RVC’s relationship with Reuters in financial services, RVC is developing similar relationships with leading corporations in other verticals, and acquiring deeper understanding of the needs and challenges CIOs and business decision makers have in increasing efficiency and/or revenues through their leverage of IT investments. In early 2004, after 10 years of successful technology investments, Reuters announced a strategy of refocusing on its core activities and away from venture technology investments. Over the ensuing few months, the partners at RVC explored the opportunity of buying RGF and successfully obtained debt financing for the purchase. On 22 June 2004, Norman Fiore, Martin Stapleton and John Taysom along with Chairman Sir David Walker became the new owners of RGF via their new vehicle Sofius Capital. RVC will remain the manager of the RGF and will continue to invest in RGF portfolio companies to maximise the overall return on the committed capital of the fund. Since inception, RVC I has invested €449 million in 82 companies, including Yahoo!, Verisign, Phone.com (now Openwave Systems), Digimarc, Infoseek, Orchestream, and Metamerge, amongst others. With 16 IPOs and 27 trade sales or other cash realisations, and a first fund that is 94% returned, they believe they have one of the strongest track records in Europe. Today, RVC has 11 staff located in London and the Silicon Valley.

Reuters Venture Capital

Visa is an American multinational financial services company that facilitates electronic payment systems throughout the world. The company operates the retail electronic payments network through the transfer of value and information among financial institutions, merchants, consumers, businesses, and government entities.   Visa also provides electronic payment, risk management, and payment security solutions to online merchants; digital goods transaction services in online games, digital media, and social networks; and mobile financial services for mobile network operators and financial institutions in developing economies.   Visa’s global payment brands include Visa, Visa Electron, PLUS, and Interlink. Together they provide payment options through credit, debit, prepaid, and commercial programs in 200 countries and territories. Visa's global network, VisaNet, delivers value-added processing services such as fraud and risk management, dispute resolution, rewards, and other business-enhancing applications.

Visa

Yahoo

The tools that power remote work are define the next generation of enterprise software.

Remote Work Tools

<div>
 
 Zed is a language-aware collaborative code editor that aims to become the standard platform for open-source software development and targets software teams. Zed enables real-time editing between users and facilitates collaboration through its built-in contacts panel. Zed&rsquo;s features include a breadcrumb trail that displays the path to the current file and a summary of the syntax nodes. Collaboration features let users add contacts and share projects; screen sharing is available for non-code collaboration. The command palette is a modal palette that helps users navigate the editor's commands using text input, while diagnostics help users identify and fix errors and warnings in their code. Zed has hard-coded language server support for several languages, including Rust, TypeScript, JSON, C/C++, and Python.
 
 
 Zed also offers a dock that can be used as a persistent terminal as well as a quick reference for documentation pages or related source files. Other features include syntactic editing, multi-cursor editing, and a file finder modal to search all files in a project by path. Zed planned to generate revenue primarily through a service-based model. Although the company is pre-revenue, it launched in beta in March 2023.
 
 
 Key customers and partnerships
 
 
 During the private alpha, the waiting list grew to 12,000 people. There are roughly 800 active users coding with Zed each week (through the alpha).
 
 
 Funding and financials
 
 
 
 In 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/17129">
 March 2023
 </a>
 , Zed raised USD 10 million in a Series A funding round led by Redpoint Ventures. The fresh funds were allocated to expand its operations and team while continuing to develop and improve its product.
 
</div>

Using AI to automate, enhance and optimize marketing activities

Marketing Automation

<div>
 
 Taboola connects advertisers with relevant and personalized content via its AI-powered content discovery platform in order to drive brand engagement. Taboola also offers a news discovery service (Taboola News) that allows personalized news feeds to be directly incorporated into mobile devices. The fiirm has introduced a number of enhancements to its solutions including an 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/8071">
 AI-powered homepage personalization tool
 </a>
 , 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/6981">
 SmartBid Dimensions
 </a>
 , an automated ad bidding technology, and a 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/23550">
 Generative AI AdMaker
 </a>
 . In February 2023, in partnership with TIME, the firm entered the ecommerce space with the launch of &lsquo;
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/16361">
 Taboola Turnkey Commerce
 </a>
 &rsquo;, which allows premium publishers to create trustworthy content that helps readers make informed purchase decisions.
 
 
 A competitive edge Taboola has over its peers such as Outbrain, is the large number of partnerships it has established with leading media publishers (9,000 by September 2021) including Bloomberg, USA Today, and NBC, which are exclusive long-term partners. In addition, in November 2021 the firm upgraded its automated ad bidding system with the launch of &lsquo;SmartBid dimensions&rsquo; which uses granular customer readership data to provide unique insights on customer intent.&nbsp;
 
 
 Key customers and partnerships
 
 
 By November 2021, Taboola&rsquo;s content discovery platform was reportedly used by more than 14,000 advertisers who provide content to 500+ million daily active users. Taboola News discovery service was offered by leading mobile device manufacturers in at least 80 countries as of July 2021.&nbsp;
 
 
 The firm has entered into a number of partnerships to enhance its product offerings including with Microsoft to launch a 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/7479">
 new ad bidding service
 </a>
 as well as with PMC to bring 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/11521">
 personalized content to leading entertainment websites
 </a>
 in its portfolio which include Rolling Stone, Billboard and Variety. Taboola has also executed on a number of acquisitions including Connexivity, one of the largest ecommerce advertising media platforms on the open web, which it acquired in In July 2021 for USD 800 million. Taboola expects the incorporation of the ecommerce data provided by Connexivity and the upselling opportunities created to drive higher yields for Taboola&rsquo;s publishers and advertisers. In May 2022, Taboola 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/10734">
 acquired Gravity R&amp;D
 </a>
 , a developer of an ad personalization engine to further enhance its customization capabilities.&nbsp;
 
 
 In November 2022, Yahoo 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/14914">
 acquired a 25% stake
 </a>
 in Taboola, becoming its largest shareholder. The firm deepened its relationship with yahoo and entered into a 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/15746">
 30-year partnership
 </a>
 to become the exclusive native advertising partner for all of Yahoo&rsquo;s digital properties and is expected to generate ~USD 1 billion in annual revenue. 
 
 
 Funding and financials
 
 
 Taboola was listed on the NASDAQ in June 2021 via a special purpose acquisition corporation (SPAC) ION Acquisition Corp, where it raised USD 526 million. The listing attracted investments from Blackrock and Federate Kaufmann Fund while the firm was valued at USD 2.6 billion. For 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/16699">
 FY 2022,
 </a>
 the firm achieved a revenue of USD 1.4 billion (1.6% YoY growth). On the back of robust 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/20968">
 Q2 2023
 </a>
 performance, the firm revised the lower bound of its full-year 2023E guidance upwards for all metrics. The company expected revenue to range from USD 1.438 billion to USD 1.469 billion, which is a YoY growth of 2.7% to 4.9%. Additionally, the adjusted EBITDA range was revised to USD 73 million to USD 80 million. To drive growth, the company planned to increase investment in its&nbsp;Yahoo partnership&nbsp;and other key segments, like performance advertising, ecommerce, and header bidding, and is optimistic that its investments will start to yield returns in FY2024E, generating ~USD 200 million in Adjusted EBITDA and USD 100 million in free cash flow.
 
</div>

Taboola is a content discovery platform that connects people with content they may like but never knew existed. It is serving over 360 billion recommendations to over 1 billion unique visitors every month on some of the Web’s most innovative publisher sites, including USA TODAY, Business Insider, Chicago Tribune, and The Weather Channel. Headquartered in New York City with R&D in Israel, Taboola also has offices in Pasadena, London, and Bangkok. Publishers, marketers, and agencies leverage Taboola to retain users on their sites, monetize their traffic, and distribute their content to drive high-quality audiences.

Unify Square provides software, cloud managed services, and consulting for global Microsoft Skype for Business enterprise deployments. The company PowerSuite software creates a unified dashboard to surface actionable insights and help manage collaboration and communications platforms - optimizing and transforming performance health and user effectiveness. It also provides an expansive single-pane of glass view, spanning six different platforms from the top four industry-leading software vendors.  It was founded in 2008 and headquartered in Bellevue, Washington.

Snap is a privately-owned global camera company focusing on multinational technology and social media. Snap is behind Snapchat, a photo messaging app that allows users to take photos, record videos, add text and drawings, and send them to recipients. In 2016, it released Spectacles, video-sharing sunglasses that free the Snapchat app from smartphone cameras.

Hortonworks is a commercial vendor of Apache Hadoop, the preeminent open source platform for storing, managing, and analyzing big data. Hortonworks Data Platform, powered by Apache Hadoop, provides an open and stable foundation for enterprises and a growing ecosystem to build and deploy big data solutions. Hortonworks is the trusted source for information on Hadoop, and together with the Apache community, Hortonworks is making Hadoop more robust and easier to install, manage, and use. Hortonworks provides unmatched technical support, training, and certification programs for enterprises, systems integrators, and technology vendors.

Carnegie Mellon University is a global research university with more than 11,000 students, 84,000 alumni, and 4,000 faculty and staff. Recognized for its world-class arts and technology programs, collaboration across disciplines, and innovative leadership in education, Carnegie Mellon is consistently a top-ranked university.

Raksul.inc is a fabless B2B platform builder. It aims to redesign and simplify value chains in legacy industries. It has enabled the ''sharing economy'' business model in printing, logistics and advertising, by connecting SME customers directly to excess capacities of existing players in various industries at a low cost.

GeekStatus provides users with the latest technology, news, reviews, and curated services.

Vlingo is a Virtual Assistant that turns your words into action by combining voice to text technology, natural language processing, and Vlingo’s Intent Engine to understand the user’s intent and take the appropriate action. Simply speak to your phone to connect with the people, businesses and activities that are important to you.  The team behind the service has some significant experience in the speech recognition space. The two co-founders (Mike Phillips and John Nguyen) worked for SpeechWorks, which was acquired by ScanSoft, which then renamed itself Nuance. Nuance most recently paid  $293 million for VoiceSignal, a company using speech recognition for mobile search in 21 languages.

Matrimony.com Pvt. Ltd is a signature internet conglomerate, managing Marquee brands such as BharatMatrimony.com and CommunityMatrimony.com. It is today, one of the fastest growing and profitable organisations in both the digital and offline space, with a reputation for innovation, technical excellence and entrepreneurship. From reaching out to South Asians across the map, in countries such as the UK, US, Dubai, Sri Lanka & Malaysia, to establishing a considerable retail presence with over 150 self-owned outlets across India, Matrimony.com spells customer satisfaction & delight. The company has pioneered several new business models (many of them global firsts) such as AssistedMatrimony.com, EliteMatrimony.com, CommunityMatrimony.com, MatrimonyGifts.com and Tambulya.com. CommunityMatrimony.com is the world's single largest conglomerate of over 350+ community oriented portals. This track record for constant innovation and cutting edge products has won it primarily millions of customers, several prestigious global awards, and cream of investors such as Bessemer, Canaan and Mayfield. What fuels Matrimony.com is the culture of intrapreneurship, passion and ethics that permeates across 3500+ strong team and top notch professionals at the helm of affairs. Matrimony.com is also a conscientious corporate citizen with a span of CSR activities that include BharatBloodBank.com, BharatEyeBank.com, BharatGreenHands.com and AbilityMatrimony.com.

BharatMatrimony.com is celebrated as the Most Trusted Matrimony Brand combining tradition and technology. A network of 15 regional portals and over 1.2 Crore members, BharatMatrimony has found a place in the Limca Book of Records for facilitating a record number of marriages.  BharatMatrimony has been recognised as the Best Matrimony Website 2007 by PC WORLD for technology and performance and is also listed in the NASSCOM's Top 100 IT Innovators. All the awards we have won have encouraged us and we stand as the most preferred site for matrimonial search according to a study by JuxtConsult.

Founded in 2003, Right Media is a  company based in New York, with offices in London, Moscow, Eugene, San Francisco and Tallahassee.  Right Media is the host of the Right Media Exchange, launched in 2005. The Right Media Exchange platform connects digital advertising companies and provides an opportunity for these participants to reach their audiences on their own terms. RMX is a holistic marketplace for managing an ad business--from full ad serving, to business development, to business expansion.

Alibaba Group’s mission is to make it easy to do business anywhere.  They enable businesses to transform the way they market, sell, operate, and improve their efficiencies. They provide the technology infrastructure and marketing reach to help merchants, brands, and other businesses to leverage the power of new technology to engage with their users and customers and operate in a more efficient way. Their businesses are comprised of core commerce, cloud computing, digital media and entertainment, and innovation initiatives. In addition, Ant Financial, a company in which they have agreed to acquire a 33% equity stake, provides payment and financial services to consumers and merchants on their platforms. An ecosystem has developed around their platforms and businesses that consists of consumers, merchants, brands, retailers, other businesses, third-party service providers, and strategic alliance partners.

Plaxo is an internet company that works and specializes in important problems in the consumer Web space, pioneering the “smart address book. Plaxo, focused on delivering on the vision of a truly smart, socially-aware, and pervasive address book; the Social Technologies Group (STG), created after the acquisition to lead address book, identity, and social strategies for all of Comcast; and  Tunerfish , a new social entertainment internal startup, incubated in STG.

Zed is a leading global player providing multi-platform marketing solutions and digital value-added content worldwide. The company operates in 62 countries in five continents with 1,000 employees, 50% of them dedicated to R&D. Zed products are available to more than 380 million potential consumers through exclusive agreements with 130 wireless operators and media companies all over the world.

EqualFooting.com, a B2B online marketplace that places small businesses on equal footing with large companies in the areas of purchasing.

Webex, now part of Cisco, provides on-demand applications for collaborative business on the Web. These applications enhance high-touch business processes, such as sales and training, with Web-touch interactions. As an on-demand provider, WebEx facilitates both internal and external collaboration. Applications are delivered over the WebEx MediaTone Network, a global network specifically designed for the highly secure delivery of on-demand applications. WebEx applications support multipoint video conferencing, Web conferencing, telework, and application remote control.

Info USA offers a full range of affordable sales and marketing solutions to help businesses acquire, manage, and retain customers. These solutions include mailing lists, sales leads, search engine marketing, email marketing, direct mail marketing, data enhancement, and online marketing.  Info USA is based in Papillion, Nebraska.

Webvan Group, Inc. and its subsidiaries, Webvan-Bay Area, Inc., Webvan Operations, Inc., and HomeGrocer.com, Inc. filed voluntary petitions for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United Stated Bankruptcy Court in July 2001 and ceased operations. Webvan Group, Inc. operates as an Internet retailer offering delivery of consumer products through a proprietary business design that integrates its Webstore, a distribution facility and delivery system. Its product offerings are principally focused on food; non-prescription drug products; and general merchandise, including housewares, pet supplies, consumer electronics, and entertainment products and books. The Webstore is customized for each facility to present only the products available in that facility. It offers a selection of traditional grocery store products and also non-grocery store products. Webvan's competitors include [Peapod](http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/peapod), PDQuick, and Albertsons.com. The company is based in Foster City, Califonia.

Yahoo! GeoCities was a free web hosting provider that launched in 1994. GeoCities offered a free website and all the tools required to build a hosted, dynamic personal site, and it was one of the most popular websites on the Internet.  Yahoo! officially shut down GeoCities on October 26, 2009.

Yahoo is a media technology company that connects people with their passions. They reach people from finance, sports, shopping, gaming, and news with the products, content, and technology. They provide a full-stack platform for businesses to connect across advertising, search, and media.

Yahoo

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