Workday Invests $250 Million into Workday Ventures

Workday, the Pleasanton, California-based provider of enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources (HR), is making an additional investment of $250 million into Workday Ventures, the company’s strategic capital arm that invests in companies developing emerging technologies for the enterprise. The expansion of the fund will reinforce Workday Ventures’ focus on the three areas of AI and machine learning (ML), intelligent automation, and serving targeted markets.

Related Article: Customer Wins for Workday, Informatica, SAS, Freshworks, and Five9

On AI and ML,the fund is investing in software companies that offer AI and ML technologies for finance and HR teams. As an example, the fund invested in Paradox, which provides a conversational recruiting platform to automate the talent acquisition process.

The fund is also continuing to invest in the intelligent automation of financial and HR business processes for greater efficiency and talent optimization. It has invested in Auditoria, the provider of an AI-based platform to automate and increase the speed, accuracy, and productivity of accounts payable and receivable teams.

In the third focus area of serving targeted markets, Workday Ventures is expanding investments into key industries, adjacent markets, and solutions aimed at delivering more value to customers. An example is the fund’s investment in Prevedere, which uses global data and AI to perform econometric forecasting to give retailers a real-time view of future shopper demand and drivers.

The additional investment expands Workday Ventures’ existing portfolio of 43 technology companies since the initial $250 million fund was announced in 2018.

AI Platform Ushur Raises $50 Million

CX automation platform Ushur successfully raised $50 million in Series C funding, which the company will use to expand its portfolio, develop new innovations in AI, and move into new regions and industry verticals.

Santa Clara, California-based Ushur uses conversational AI, language intelligence, and document understanding to deliver industry-specific and personalized CX. Its no-code platform supports more than 60 languages, and comes with sentiment analysis and intelligent document processing capabilities.

The new funding was led by Third Point Ventures, the capital arm of New York City-based Third Point Management, with participation from existing investors Iron Pillar, 8VC, Aflac Ventures, and Pentland Ventures.

OneSignal Secures Strategic Investment from ServiceNow Ventures

Customer engagement platform provider OneSignal announced a new strategic investment from ServiceNow Ventures, adding to the former’s $50 million Series C funding in September 2022. The new investment is indicative of the commitment from ServiceNow to nurture companies that create software solutions addressing key enterprise challenges, and will be used to accelerate OneSignal’s go-to-market initiatives with a focus on omnichannel messaging and orchestration capabilities.

In OneSignal’s State of Customer Messaging 2022 Report, the company says mobile push notifications represent the most important customer engagement channel for two-thirds of the surveyed organizations. OneSignal offers self-service engagement and personalization capabilities across push notification, email, SMS, and in-app channels, company officials emphasize, which aim to help users to gain a competitive edge in today’s market.

“A strong multichannel presence is one of the most effective strategies for businesses to engage their stakeholders—buyers, users, employees – anyone who is a critical part of the enterprise value chain,” says George Deglin, CEO and co-founder of OneSignal. “The investment from ServiceNow Ventures allows us to continue scaling our automated omnichannel messaging platform even further so we can integrate more use cases and expand our global footprint to help organizations engage better.”

ServiceNow also recently selected OneSignal as its SMS and push notification provider for its Knowledge 2023 event, adding to OneSignal’s customer list of more than 6,000.

Cleary Announces $7.5 Million in Funding

Cleary, the San Francisco-based provider of a digital employee experience (EX) platform for distributed teams, recently closed a $4.5 million seed funding round led by Austin, Texas-based Moonshots Capital, with participation from Liberty City Ventures, Crosslink Capital, SeaChange Fund, and Quiet Capital, among others. The current seed round, which follows an initial capital raise of $3 million, will be used by the company to expand its footprint as demand increases for optimized employee journeys in the modern workplace.

Cleary streamlines the employee journey through internal communications, culture, and company touchpoints, referencing tools and capabilities, including company news and updates, org charts, cross-functional team management, an internal wiki, internal search, events, and public recognition, among others. Cleary also enables customizable employee journeys for onboarding and department transfers, as well as helping people teams provide a cohesive experience for employees. 

Before starting Cleary, co-founders Thomas Kunjappu and Ryan O’Donnell led the development of internal people tools at Twitter. Inspired by the success of the applications and their centrality to the digital employee experience there, the two then founded Cleary to bring their approach not just to large enterprises but to firms of all sizes.

QuestionPro Acquires UK Survey Platform doopoll

QuestionPro, the US online survey and research services provider, has acquired the assets of Cardiff, Wales-based survey creation platform doopoll for an undisclosed sum.

Doopoll offers multilingual real-time engagement for companies to capture opinions online, including open-ended feedback. The Great Big Lockdown Survey, launched by the UK’s Daily Mirror to capture what life was like in Britain during the Covid-19 lockdown, used doopoll’s solution to gather 22 million responses from more than 400,000 people in four-and-a-half days.

As part of the acquisition, doopoll’s service will be integrated into the QuestionPro research and experience management platform, which includes surveys, research and insights, and CX and workforce/employee experience software. The acquisition will also boost the physical presence in the UK of QuestionPro, which was founded in Seattle in 2015 but is now headquartered in Dallas, Texas, and has offices across the US, Mexico, Europe, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and India. Recent QuestionPro acquisitions include SuiteCX, the purveyor of a range of customer-oriented solutions; and Digsite, a provider of qualitative research capabilities and of a collaborative insights platform.

QuestionPro and doopoll executives are united in saying that combining the two firms constitutes a win for customers, who will now benefit from a broader and richer set of features able to obtain more and better insights.

Related Article: QuestionPro Acquiring Journey Mapping Provider SuiteCX