Quick News №17

Global corporation Salesforce has completed its takeover of enterprise messenger Slack. The news isn’t just important in terms of who now owns your taskmaster, but in the amount of the purchase: $27.7B is one of the records in the software market, along with deals like the $27B purchase of LinkedIn and the $34B purchase of Red Hat.

Another global leader, but this time from a very different field. iHerb, a marketplace for health, vitamin and mineral supplements, applied for an IPO. The value and an exact number of shares have not yet been determined, but the application has already been submitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission for verification.

Another contender to go public is Nexters, a gaming company with Russian roots. Last week, it announced that it raised $50M from Mubadala Investment Company and VPE Capital. The money will be used to close the SPAC deal, a merger with Kismet Acquisition One. As recently as last year, the company was among the top 5 largest independent game developers in Europe.

A $50M investment went to SaaS online learning platform GetCourse from Winter Capital, Goldman Sachs and Baring Vostok. In general, today, thanks to seamless integration with payment systems, the platform is used by over 20 000 users and its turnover is estimated at $0.6B. A world leader!

Speaking of interesting deals last week, it is important to mention the round of the startup Postoplan: the social media posting service raised $1.5M from TMT Investments, YellowRockets and Bergtop.vc in a convertible loan. Along with the company’s revenue, its valuation has gone up rapidly, with a 12-fold increase in a year to €20M.

But the amount of another round is being kept under wraps: Ukrainian startup Datrics raised investment from venture capital fund ICU Ventures. The company’s solution is a no-code platform for analytics and machine learning, which allows businesses to avoid hiring programmers to implement analytical models.

The “symbol” of the crypto industry, CryptoMother, an NFT painting signed by Vitalik Buterin, will be sold at an auction on 30 July. “Mona Lisa” of the crypto is not only an NFT token but also has a 100cm x 100cm physical copy painted in oil.

Have a productive week!