News
Durham e-commerce startup Spoonflower, which sells custom fabric and runs a marketplace for designers, has been bought by Shutterfly in a deal worth $225 million.
The sale comes after Spoonflower saw record growth during the pandemic, as consumers chose to shop online instead of in-person and more people turned to crafting while stuck at home.
WASHINGTON, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Full Measure Education, the company behind the leading mobile engagement platform for colleges and universities, announced it has raised a $10 million growth equity round led by Fulcrum Equity Partners, one of the Southeast's largest growth equity firms. This financing provides Full Measure with the opportunity to broaden its impact on the student journey by expanding its platform to meet the needs of all institutional stakeholders.
Full Measure plans to use this investment to scale its executive, customer success, product, and engineering teams from 40 employees to 100. Along with this team growth will come an expansion of its Washington, D.C headquarters, where the team looks forward to enlarging its footprint in historic U-Line Arena located in NoMa. These changes will help Full Measure expedite its roadmap considerably.
Levitate, the keep-in-touch marketing platform started by former ShareFile founder Jesse Lipson, quadrupled its revenue in 2020 and now has more than 2,000 business customers. Additionally, the company added $8M of funding to their Series B round, bringing total fundraising to $20M.
"Our mission as a company is to help small, relationship-based businesses grow," said Jesse Lipson, Founder and CEO of Levitate. "With the global pandemic impacting many small businesses across the country, our clients have been relying on Levitate more than ever to help them stay top of mind with clients, prospects, and referral sources in a personal and authentic way."
Read more
American Express announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire substantially all of Kabbage , a leading financial technology company providing cash flow management solutions to small businesses in the U.S. The transaction represents an important step toward American Express’ goal of being an essential partner to small businesses through a broad range of payment, cash flow and financial management tools.
Levitate, a Raleigh-based marketing platform and customer relationship solution provider, has raised an additional $6 million for its A.I.-powered software offering small businesses and alternative to mass blast emailing. To date, the startup has raised $12 million from investors including Tippet Venture Partners, Durham, N.C.-based Bull City Venture Partners, and angel investor Peter Gassner, the co-founder and CEO of Veeva Systems, and investor in Zoom.
