People in Israel's tight-knit startup community are talking about the reported death, and the odd life, of the once high-flying startup Mobli.

Mobli raised $86 million in venture funds in six years, including from some big names.

But the company made cuts this week in layoffs first reported by the Israeli business newspaper Calcalist and confirmed by Business Insider.

Mobli's CEO, Moshe Hogeg, told us that the company had cut 15 employees this week and was closing its Israeli research-and-development center.

Sources are telling us that this represents all of Mobli's remaining Israeli employees, though Hogeg insists that the company is not being closed down entirely. He says he is retaining an R&D team in Europe.

Mobli employed about 50 people at its height, but sources tell us only a handful remain.

In Israel, the shock isn't so much that Mobli is struggling — it's that people don't understand how the company has stayed alive as long as it has. It jumped from one failed product to the next.

How is this company still alive?

Mobli sprang to life in 2010 as a photo-sharing social-media site backed by high-profile angel investors including Lance Armstrong, Serena Williams, and Tobey Maguire. It later landed $60 million from Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, it said, for a total of $86 million raised.

Perhaps the highest-profile photo shared using Mobli was Armstrong's notorious photo of himself with his Tour de France jerseys after he was barred for life by the International Cycling Union for doping.

But then Instagram came along and Facebook bought it, and that pretty much killed Mobli as a photo-sharing social network.

The company pivoted to other apps. In 2015 it launched an app called EyeIn, a photo service for publishers that let them find pictures of events shared on social-media sites.

It shut EyeIn down just two months after it was launched when Instagram blocked the app from using Instagram photos.

"We had to shut down EyeIn two months after launch because Facebook/Instagram blocked us from their API, rendering our technology useless,"Hogeg confirmed to us.

See ya later, Slant?

Mobli then moved on to Slant, a news site based in New York for freelance articles. Writers got professional editing, and Slant took a 30% cut of any advertising revenue their articles generated. Slant hit 4 million readers in a month and published 9,000 stories from 1,400 writers, but its editor, Amanda Gutterman, announced in her farewell letter in April that Slant was being shut down, as reported by Politico.

A former employee told us that much of this traffic was generated through paid-ad campaigns by services like Outbrain.

Slant later told Politico that it was not closed for good but would be back once the company figured out a new business model. Gutterman has moved on to a new job at The Dose, however, and the site is not functioning.

Mobli now has a new project, a social-network app called Galaxia that launched in March, in which people are encouraged to take on different "personas."

Mobli says Galaxia's tech came from a startup it acquired called Pheed. The rumor was that it paid $40 million in cash for Pheed, but Hogeg tells us that the true price was really "just a few million."

The people we talked to have marveled that Mobli says it is still in business and can't understand how.

Hogeg says Mobli has been clear where its money has come from: venture investors.

"We've always been very transparent about our funding," he says. "Amongst are investors: Carlos Slim, Leo DiCaprio, and Kenges Rakishev and all that info is readily available. We raised sufficient funds to allow us to stay in business thus far."

Mobli was also known for being one of the first startups to use Nasdaq's private market, allowing early employees to cash out their shares in the company by selling them to other private investors.

A $14,000 phone

In the meantime, Moshe Hogeg is focused on a new company, Sirin Labs, where he is president, investor, and cofounder but not CEO. The CEO is Tal Cohen.

Right after employees were let go at Mobli, Sirin launched its product on Tuesday in London: a smartphone for about $14,000, or 9,500 pounds.

The phone is aimed at wealthy people who want a fast and stylish phone that also encrypts all their data.

Sirin says it raised $72 million in funding and has 85 employees based in Switzerland, Sweden, England, and Israel.

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Lost My Name, the personalised children's book startup backed by Google Ventures, has raised an additional €4 million (£3 million).

The London startup — founded in 2012 by Asi Sharabi and Tal Oron — creates customised books based around a child's name. The books are created and ordered online, then sent out to printing partners around the world.

The investment, which brings total funding in the company to $13 million (£9 million), comes from Berlin-based Project A Ventures. It was described as an extension to the $9 million (£6 million) series A round that Lost My Name raised last June from Google Ventures, Greycroft, and Allen & Co.

"As a full-stack publisher, we aim to create the best personalised experiences as we keep blending storytelling, print and engineering in ways that have never been done before," said Sharabi in a statement. "Project A’s operational expertise and hands on approach will help us upskill our teams and set strong foundations for future growth. We're thrilled to have them on board."

Florian Heinemann, founding partner at Project A, is joining the Lost My Name board. In a statement, he said: "We intend to support Lost My Name in building a solid infrastructure in terms of CRM, performance marketing and business intelligence to enable growth on an international scale.

"We believe that with the current team line-up, the competencies within the company and the investor base, Lost My Name is well on track to become one of the relevant global players in personalised children’s content."

The company's first product entitled "The Little Boy/Girl Who Lost His/Her Name" was the best selling picture book of 2015 in Spain, Italy, and Australia and the top grossing one in the UK and the US. Their second book, "The Incredible Intergalactic Journey Home," is currently only available in the UK and the US but it is due to launch across other European countries later in the year.

Lost My Name announced in December that it had sold over 1 million books. That number now stands at over 1.5 million.

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Marc Andreessen has two words of advice for startups: Raise prices.

In a recent interview, "The 4-Hour Workweek" author and tech investor Tim Ferriss asked Andreessen what words he would put on a billboard to reach the greatest number of people.

The legendary investor said that he's actually considered hiring a skywriter to write "raise prices" so startups across San Francisco would see it.

Andreessen said:

The No. 1 thing — just the theme and we see it everywhere — the No. 1 theme with our companies have when they get really struggling is they are not charging enough for their product. It has become absolutely conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley that the way to succeed is to price your product as low as possible under the theory that if it's low-priced everybody can buy it and that's how you get the volume.

It's a problem called "too hungry to eat."

"They don't charge enough for their product to be able to afford the sales and marketing required to actually get anybody to buy it. And so they can't afford to hire the sales rep to go sell the product," he said.

If startups can't sell anything, then they again start lowering prices to bring in more volume. But at that point, Andreessen cautions that it becomes only a race to the bottom.

"It just makes the problem worse. And so, probably the single number one thing we try to get our companies to do is raise prices," Andreessen said. "By the way, it's like, 'Is your product any good if people won't pay more for it?'"

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Glassdoor on Friday announced that it had raised another $40 million, led by mutual fund giant T. Rowe Price Associates.

Glassdoor founder and CEO Robert Hohman tells us the fundraising is part of his master plan to have a spectacular IPO.

Having a major mutual fund as an investor will help with introductions, advice and everything else needed to convince other institutional investors to jump on board the IPO. 

"By the time we do go public, we'll know who major shareholders are likely to be," Hohman says. "I wanted that. I wanted someone like T. Rowe prior to being public to provide that kind of anchor."

Hohman says that he and T. Rowe fund manager, Henry Ellenbogen, have been talking for years, having met at various conferences held by investment banks where fund managers and startups can schmooze.

Glassdoor, a job-hunting site where employees share salary information and reviews of their companies, raised a $70 million round in January, 2015, bringing total funding to $162 million round  With this round, it's raised about $200 million total since it was founded in 2007, it says.

Good advice

Hohman insists his company is not burning through cash and is balancing growth and profits. When he takes Glassdoor public, he hopes to show investors a company that is growing revenues "profitably or very close to cash-flow break even," he says. Hohman says revenue has doubled each year for the past four years.

Profitable startups have been rare in tech for the past few years where investors, public and private, valued revenue growth over all else. One VC has been warning the world that this kind of hyper-growth is a very bad idea: Benchmark's Bill Gurley. And Gurley was an early investor in Glassdoor. 

"I credit Gurley for advising us to pay attention to how we grow," Hohman says.

Glassdoor has now raised about $200 million although it isn't quite a "unicorn," the Silicon Valley term for startups valued at $1 billion or more by their investors.

Hohman wouldn't tell us the final valuation after this round, except to describe it as a "modest up round" meaning the company is now valued slightly more than it was before the round.

Private funding tracking site PitchBook says that Glassdoor has been looking for investors since April and was expected to close this $40 million round by August at a pre-money valuation of $820 million, with a post money valuation of $860 million.

SEE ALSO: Silicon Valley startups are terrified by a new idea: profits

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Tony Fadell may no longer be the CEO of Nest, the company he founded that was folded into Google's Alphabet holding company, but he won't be idle.

In addition to staying on the board at Alphabet, Fadell told Bloomberg on Friday that he's been "secretively" investing in companies for the last decade, and has had some involvement in more than 100 other startups.

As he put it:

Over the past eight to 10 years I’ve been investing in companies very secretively. It’s all been confidential, and it’s been over 100 companies like that who have technologies, have incredibly just disruptive ideas that can change the world in a positive way, whether it’s in medical or it’s in consumer products or energy. In some cases I’ve been on the board. In some cases I helped them raise more funds or work on the marketing angles for them, the messaging, the product designs.

One company he highlighted was called Phononic:

They have an innovative solid-state cooling and heating solution. It’s almost like a chip. And it replaces compressors in commercial fridges, your residential fridges, also freezers. So you can get rid of those big, ugly compressors that make a lot of noise.

He's also been involved with "Flexport, Airware, Mousera, Bump (acquired by Google) and ZEP Solar (bought by SolarCity)."

Fadell was replaced as Nest CEO on Friday, after several months of reports scrutinizing Fadell's management style and Nest's product timelines.

Read the full interview on Bloomberg here>>

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James Proud grew up in a particularly rough part of South London. At age 12, when he started earning spending money by designing websites, his mom thought he had become a drug dealer.

(He reminded his mom that drug dealers probably don't get their checks in the mail. "I don't want to know," she told him, as Proud now recalls.)

By the time he graduated, Proud had figured out that he was more interested in entrepreneurship than furthering his academic career.

So, even though he did well enough in school that he had the opportunity to become the first in his family to attend university, Proud decided instead to pursue a career in the technology industry.

"My parents went insane," Proud says.

Fast forward to today: Proud, now 24 years old, is the CEO of Hello, which makes Sense — a $129 sleep-tracking device for your bedroom that raised $2.4 million on Kickstarter in 2014. Proud promises it can actually help you sleep better.

On Monday, Proud revealed for the first time that Hello raised a $30 million round of funding in late 2015, led by Temasek Holdings, the venture capital arm of the Singapore government, to further develop the Sense device. Overall, including the Kickstarter proceeds, Hello has raised over $40 million.

A long, strange road

It's been a long, winding trip for Proud. In 2009, at 18 years old, Proud started GigLocator, a site to track when your favorite bands and artists were playing near you so you could buy tickets.

Six months later, that qualified him for entrance to the inaugural Thiel Fellowship, a two-year program where Peter Thiel — the famed, and currently controversial, Silicon Valley venture investor — pays promising young entrepreneurs $100,000 to skip college and pursue their original business ideas. He accepted the fellowship and moved to San Francisco in 2010.

In 2012, Proud sold GigLocator to Peter Shapiro, the owner of New York's legendary Brooklyn Bowl nightclub and its international franchises. He now says he was never super in love with it as a long-term business strategy anyway.

"GigLocator was a side-project that turned into a thing," he says.

The money went into Hello, his new venture, and he started considering what he actually wanted to do. He decided to focus his efforts on solving big problems, and decided to start with the concept of sleep. Everybody does it, but not everybody is good at it, making it a ripe business target.

"Our ambitions are bigger than sleep, but there's so much to do in sleep," Proud says.

Hello, again

When Proud first founded Hello, his team conceived of a wearable, kind of like the Apple Watch or a Fitbit, that you'd wear to bed. To make the dream a reality, Proud got highly-placed tech figures including Facebook Messenger head David Marcus and Xiaomi VP Hugo Barra to invest a little over $10 million.

Which was great, except for the part where Proud realized they were on the entirely wrong track. Wearable gadgets are great in theory, Proud says now, but people stop wearing them pretty soon after getting them. And if people aren't wearing them, they aren't gathering data, and the whole exercise is rendered pointless.

To his point, he says that 15 months after Sense hit the market, 70% of customers are still using theirs every night, while he jokes that 99% of people ditch their wearables after only a few weeks or months.

"If you have to put it on your wrist, you already failed," Proud says. "We were building the wrong product."

After what he describes as a difficult, not-so-fun meeting with his investors, Hello decided to start all over with a new design, and a Kickstarter campaign that would raise $2.4 million.

The new Sense — the same one that you can currently buy — is a tiny, unobtrusive little gizmo that sits on a nightstand. A little "sleep pill" sensor clips on to your pillow (you can buy two if your partner wants one, too). All you have to do to gather that data is sleep.

"You should be able to come home drunk and collapse in bed and it'll still collect data," Proud says. 

Sleep, a dream

The Sense device itself is inspired by the look of the Beijing National Stadium, where the 2008 Olympics were held. It was designed to look elegant and not at all like your garden-variety black box of a gadget — if it stuck out in any way, people might remove it from their nightstands, and all would be lost.

Under the hood, Sense sports a variety of sensors, including those for humidity, noise, light, and air quality. If your room is too bright, too noisy, or too humid for you to get quality sleep, it'll glow to let you know. Otherwise, you get the green light go-ahead. 

The "sleep pill" sensor tracks your head movement on the pillow to analyze your sleep pattern. The Sense has a speaker — at night, it can be used for relaxation-inducing white noise; in the morning, it's an alarm that goes off when you're naturally ready to wake up, so you're ready to take on the day.

Every morning, you get a sleep score, from 1 to 100, along with suggestions on how to improve (Proud says that Hello has accidentally sold a lot of people on getting humidifiers). You can check your score once a day, once a week, or once a year, since the app is always gathering data anyway.

As more people use Sense, the better picture Hello's systems can get of the factors that go into getting a good night's sleep. He says Hello is using cutting-edge neural networks to help the computer "learn" from that data.

"We've taught the computer what sleep looks like," Proud says.

Sleep walking

Proud sees Hello and the Sense device as kind of on the vanguard of a new kind of computing, where intelligence just kind of hovers around you, rather than waiting for you to access a device.  In the same vein as the Amazon Echo, Nest thermostat, or forthcoming Google Home, Proud sees Sense as something that's there when you need it, but that vanishes when you don't.

Even with all of the overall hype to this market, though, Proud says he'd never really consider selling. He likes that he both lives and works in San Francisco, while potential buyers would probably make him commute to their offices in the suburban expanses south of the city.

So long as he's paying his rent (he can walk to work, and he gets to work on the interesting problems he's laid out for himself), Proud says that he's in no hurry to sell or otherwise exit. 

"I'm pretty basic in my life and needs," Proud says.

SEE ALSO: Google and Amazon are slowly killing the gadget as we know it

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A new UK HR technology startup is coming out of stealth mode and announcing that it has raised a $7.5 million (£5.1 million) seed round from investors including TransferWise cofounder Taavet Hinrikus, Saul and Robin Klein's seed fund LocalGlobe, and Silicon Valley investment firm Bessemer Venture Partners.

hibob creates an online destination for employment data that can tell businesses about their staff and suggest which perks a company should offer. Put in information like an employee's marital status or their passions and you'll get better perks out of the system.

$7.5 million is a big number for a startup's seed round. Those rounds usually come in at hundreds of thousands of pounds, not millions. And the investors in hibob are top tier as well.

The platform isn't yet open to everyone: It's invite-only but companies can register their interest on its website.

Investor Saul Klein had this to say about the hibob funding round:

LocalGlobe is incredibly proud to join our friends at Bessemer in backing an incredibly strong team, with a great idea, in a space that we believe is wide open for disruption. hibob is set to do to HR and benefits what Slack did for team communication. Putting brains and beauty at the heart of their product and delivering huge benefits to the user.

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HSBC is developing a major new app called "Nudge" that aims to help people save money by keeping track of their everyday spending.

The high-profile development was actually born out of a simple exercise between HSBC's new digital chief and his wife.

"My wife used to leave Post-It notes on the fridge, nudging me not to eat the rest of the desserts in the fridge," said Raman Bhatia, head of digital UK at HSBC in an interview with Business Insider.

"The notes would say, 'you've had one pot already, don't eat another.' Basically it was a push notification, it's the same principle [as those used on Nudge]."

Nudge sends tailor-made notifications to users on their spending habits, telling them how much they are spending on a day-to-day basis and comparing it to past days or similar people.

For example, it can tell you that today you spent £25 ($36) more on food than you did last week, or that you have spent £50 more on coffee in one week than someone else in the same age or demographic does.

The idea is to "encourage customers to make small, regular financial decisions that will result in a change to long-term spending habits," says HSBC.

"We are the first bank to marry behavioural science with everyday banking," says Bhatia. "The theory of Nudge is very simple. Whether you are deciding to eat that next doughnut or save for a rainy day, people are motivated by the present rather than planning for the future."

"We thought, 'how do you make everyday financing more engaging and contextual for customers,' so we partnered with leading academic Professor Paul Dolan [from the London School of Economics and Political Science] to look at how to address everyday financial behaviour."

The app took around 6-8 weeks to build and was trialled with 500 HSBC employees over a 3-month period at the start of the year.

Bhatia says: "We found that a combination of positive reinforcement and messages of loss aversion, and comparing your [spending] activity to people like you on a real-time basis helped people trying to save."

Bhatia added that the feedback from the pilot scheme of Nudge was "overwhelmingly" positive and says the more personalised the notifications are, the more the users saves money.

"We deliberately tried to be 'nannying' with the notifications and the users of the app found that the more highly personalised the messages were, the more people were acting on [notifications]. For example, personalised messages [that had greater effect] were like 'if you spend this much on coffee, you will not meet your saving goal,' rather than 'you are spending a lot of money on coffee,'" said Bhatia.

It is with this in mind that Bhatia and his team are making tweaks to the app before a public roll-out to HSBC customers.

Nudge is potentially a big deal for HSBC, which is currently a lot less prominent in the fintech — financial technology — sector than other banks, many of which are ploughing huge amounts of investment into more esoteric concepts such as blockchain, the technology that underpins bitcoin.

While not as flashy, HSBC's tech developments are helping customers, says Bhatia. For example, HSBC claims it has saved retail customers over £100 million by automatically signing customers up to text message alerts that tell them if they are over their agreed lending limits.

Usually, if a customer breaches an agreed overdraft limit, they are charged a £5 penalty per day they remain over the limit. This can sting you at the end of the month if you don't check your balance regularly.

But the text from HSBC notifies the customer to the breach and if they deposit the relevant funds to take them back into their agreed limit they can avoid the charge.

As for Nudge, Bhatia is tight-lipped on the actual launch date. He didn't even give what quarter or year the bank is working towards for a full launch. HSBC customers will have to wait for now.

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DocPlanner, a startup that helps healthcare professionals manage their diaries, has raised $20 million (£14 million) and merged with rival firm Doctoralia.com.

The Polish company, which claims to process 200,000 bookings a month, received the investment from venture capital firm Target Global.

DocPlanner's online software is aimed at private healthcare providers, including individual doctors, dentists and other healthcare professionals such as dietitians and psychologists, as well as small and large clinics. The company says doctors can use its software to:

• manage their professional profile
• follow and respond to opinions received from patients
• offer an online calendar to their existing and new patients
• and improve their office administration with the help of features like a personal "tele-assistant" and automatic appointment reminders.

The latest investment means DocPlanner’s total funding to date stands at $34 million (£24 million). Previous investors include EBRD, Point Nine Capital, Piton Capital, RTAventures, and Fabrice Grinda, who has invested in the likes of Airbnb and Uber.

Yaron Valler, general partner at Target Global, provided the following statement:

"We are proud to become an investor in DocPlanner. Our team was blown away by the market response to their unique product suite which provides better patient management, more sophisticated marketing and lead generation tools to doctors and clinics. We believe that DocPlanner’s ability to expand internationally by integrating local service providers will lead them to a position of market dominance."

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NOW WATCH: Mark Cuban explains why downloading Snapchat is a huge mistake

Dubsmash quickly became an overnight success when it debuted in late 2014.

The app let users create videos of themselves lip syncing to popular songs or movie lines. But unlike Instagram or Vine, these videos, called "dubs," weren't shared directly onto Dubsmash. They were meant to go viral on other platforms. 

But, 100 million users and countless celebrity dubs later, Dubsmash is changing its tune.

Last month, the app was completely revamped to become a full-fledged messaging service. Dubsmash now lets users send private messages and videos to individuals and groups. Dubsmash also added Profile Dubs, which let users highlight their favorite dub and connect with friends, in addition to some new features that help users easily find videos and audio. 

As Dubsmash's president Suchit Dash told Tech Insider, it's all part of a plan to transform Dubsmash into the premiere video messaging platform. 

“A lot of people associated Dubsmash with karaoke and lip-syncing,” Dash said. “We think people, more and more, are going to communicate through video. And we want to be the primary way people do that.”

Celebrities have been central to Dubsmash's success. A number of famous faces posted dubs made by the app to their Instagram feeds. Jimmy Fallon, to the surprise of Dubsmash, asked Selena Gomez to make a dub during an appearance on "The Tonight Show." (He's since repeated the segment with Kate Hudson and Penelope Cruz.) And Rihanna teamed up with Dubsmash to debut her 2015 single "Bitch Better Have My Money" exclusively on the app. 

But Dubsmash observed something interesting: Most of its users were actually sharing their dubs privately among friends, rather than on public forums.

“They were people using dubs almost as a replacement of an emoji,” Dash said. “So, Dubsmash 2.0 is really about giving people space for them to connect with their friends.”

Since Dubsmash 2.0 launched on May 17, the app has seen 500,000 friend connections made each day and two dubs sent inside the application per second, according to data provided by Dash.

But of course, if Dubsmash wants to be the primary video messaging service, it will have to dethrone Snapchat. And that won't be an easy feat. In January, Snapchat confirmed to the Financial Times that the app has 6 billion video views per day on its platform. 

When Tech Insider asked about the inevitable comparisons to Snapchat, Dash said he considers the permanency of the dubs created on the app as a significant advantage.

“What’s amazing is the number of people that come back to see their dubs, almost like a work of art that they once created. It’s a very lasting format,” Dash said. “And we find users want that level of history.”

Dash says that Dubsmash is continuing to test new features, including tools focused on facial recognition, some of which users can expect this summer. Dubsmash will also be looking to form more partnerships with media and entertainment companies so they can promote their content with dubs on the app, similar to Snapchat's Discover platform.

But expect video messaging to remain Dubsmash's main focus.

“We want users to continuously come to the application and continuously create,” Dash said. “And messaging is the best way to make sure that there’s constant creation happening.”

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European tech startups will struggle to gain traction in the US unless they send their CEO to the country, according to an investor at Nokia.

Bo Ilsoe, general partner at venture capital firm Nokia Growth Partners, which has more than $1 billion to invest in growth stage companies, argued on Wednesday that European tech startups are setting themselves up for failure if they try and hire a US country manager against companies like Google and Facebook.

Instead they need to relocate their leader, or at the very least, a strong cofounder. "That’s when it starts working and when they start transferring the culture," said Ilsoe during a venture capital panel at the Noah Berlin tech conference.

European tech companies that expand to the US typically need to form partnerships with large American companies if they are going to be successful, added Ilsoe. "They [US corporates] don’t want to see some unempowered US person for lack of a better word," he said.

The US technology market is one of the biggest in the world and European tech startups can significantly boost their revenues if they get the expansion right.

In 2014, Huddle, a UK-founded enterprise collaboration software company, relocated its CEO (Alastair Mitchell) from London to San Francisco. The company went on to secure a significant venture capital investment, win several large US customers, and compete with companies like Box and DropBox.

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NOW WATCH: How to see everything Google knows about you

What’s notable about recent mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity in software companies (including SaaS) isn’t the number of deals (7), their worth ($8.6B disclosed value), or even the timing (all took place in just the last 30 days).

What’s notable is whether this recent wave of activity signals the arrival of more growth— as opposed to consolidation — deals by acquirers.

Why does that distinction matter? Well first, let’s take a quick look at the deals: four of the seven deals were private equity firms (Vista Equity Partners, Accel KKR, and Thoma Bravo) acquiring companies (Marketo & Ping Identity, Sciquest, and Qlik Technologies, respectively). That’s just business as usual in line with past tech M&A activity: Non-growth transactions in the form of going-private deals (or consolidation by large, established technology companies) have largely driven tech M&A volumes just shy of peak levels last seen in 2000.

Since not all M&A is equal, the difference between non-growth and growth M&A is important as it signals forward-looking investment in a broader platform shift and new product cycles.

That’s why the other three recent cloud services deals — Salesforce.com’s $2.9B acquisition of ecommerce software platform Demandware and Oracle’s acquisitions of customer engagement and energy efficiency company Opower and construction contracts/payment management company Textura — are the ones worth paying attention to. They represent growth deals — product-line extensions, geographic extensions, and so on — orchestrated to increase top-line growth for the acquirer. As I’ve written about before, this has been a lagging area of tech M&A for the past 15 years and belies what was really happening underneath the superficial increase in M&A activity in 2015 (i.e., growth volumes represented only about 20% of peak 2000 levels).

But is there now more growth M&A activity on the horizon?

The question is whether the recent acquisitions by Salesforce.com and Oracle foreshadow the impending arrival of more “growth” acquisitions from other large tech incumbents, such as the likes of Cisco and Microsoft. To answer this question, it helps to look at the broader context of what conditions tend to drive M&A —

Condition #1: Declining core revenue growth

Tech is, by definition, a product-driven business. Products have cycles. Revenue tracks cycles. So when a company gets to the other side of a product cycle, revenue growth rates decline until the company finds a way to re-invigorate that cycle or, more likely, to invent — or acquire — a new product that is on the leading vs. lagging side of its product cycle.

IBM’s 16 straight quarters of declining revenue growth are an example of what happens when a company is on the lagging side of a product cycle. What remains to be seen is if their long-term bets in A.I. and blockchain (CEO Ginni Rometty recently revealed that they have over 200 experiments going) can help get them to the other side. With most companies in this position — that is, in between short-term product cycles and long-term investment payoff or seeking new directions altogether — we might expect them to look to M&A as a way to address that gap and decline in core revenue growth.

Condition #2: High cash balances

M&A requires money. A measure of a company’s ability to make acquisitions is the amount of cash on the balance sheet divided by the market capitalization of the company; if the result is high then that means the company has more degrees of freedom to use cash to fund acquisitions.

So, all things being equal, we would expect more M&A activity when companies have a high percentage of cash relative to market cap. The most innovative companies, after all, are the ones that re-invest their cash into future growth — not just as dividends to stockholders — so they can continue to stay ahead and build even greater value.

Condition #3: Increasing (or at least stable) PE multiples

Every company wants to make acquisitions when its stock is trading at all-time high price-to-earnings (PE) multiples. Especially relative to the target company’s PE multiple. Why? Because the earnings that the company acquires from the target company are valued post-deal at the acquirer’s PE multiple, which makes the deal more palatable to the existing company’s shareholders. Earnings dilution is bad and deters M&A.

But, if you can’t have all-time high PE multiples (as we saw in the 2000 tech bubble), then you at least want stable and increasing vs. decreasing multiples. Volatility in PE multiples makes it hard for boards to forecast dilution or accretion from M&A and thus makes them more likely to sit tight until multiples stabilize.

Given our above conditions framework for thinking about tech M&A, let’s take a look at what’s happening among the potential “incumbent” acquirer class.

Every successful startup, after all, goes on to become the new incumbent — and at a faster time scales than ever before.

Note, when we talk about the “incumbents”, we mean large tech companies that have been public company leaders in their respective domains for a long time — EMC (now Dell-EMC), Google, HP (now Hewlett Packard Enterprise and HP Inc), Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce.com, SAP, VMware (also part of Dell-EMC), etc. We’d contrast these with the “new incumbents” — companies that have gone public in the past five years or so that are now establishing themselves as potential new leaders — Facebook, LinkedIn, Servicenow, Splunk, Workday, etc. Every successful startup, after all, goes on to become the new incumbent — and at faster time scales than ever before.

The graph above shows the trends among the top tech incumbents against the three M&A conditions I outlined:

• Declining core revenue growth — Check! In fact, from the bubble peaks, where revenue growth was around 40%, this group is now looking at ~10% trailing revenue growth.
• High cash balances — Check! Cash as a percentage of market cap is approaching 20%, near the highs of the last 17-years. We haven’t seen levels higher than this since 2002, when we were in the doldrums of the post-bubble crash and market caps were near all-time lows.
• Increasing/stable PE multiple — Somewhat. While we are a ways off the peak 2000 PE levels of 140x, PE levels are still very robust and, most importantly, stable. Stability is more important even without super high multiples, because volatility is the enemy of M&A activity.

So if conditions are ripe for tech M&A among the incumbent group, why haven’t we seen more growth M&A to date?

Well, it turns out that many of the same market characteristics that favor M&A also make companies prime targets for the activist shareholder crowd. Activists screen for declining core businesses with high cash balances because they want that cash returned to shareholders in the form of dividends or stock buybacks. This means those activist targets can no longer invest in growth — in the form of new product-cycle M&A or internal R&D — because doing so would depress their near-term earnings and consume excess cash.

And that’s exactly what’s happened in tech: As the amount of assets under management by activists has grown…

…so too has the level of activist engagement among the tech incumbent crowd.

Notice what names are absent from the list of recent activist engagements above however — Salesforce.com and Oracle, both of whom feature prominently among the recent M&A activity.

So why have they escaped the wrath of the activists? Salesforce.com has, quite straightforwardly, done a great job growing the business. Even though their revenue growth rate has slowed over the past 5 years, they’ve still grown the top line roughly 5x over that time period. That kind of growth is kryptonite to the activists. And Oracle, despite having basically flat top-line growth, is roughly 25% controlled by its founder, Larry Ellison. That kind of shareholder control is another kind of prophylactic that protects against activist intervention. It’s for these reasons that Google, too (with its tri-class voting structure) has been an active acquirer among the incumbent crowd since it doesn’t have to spend time fighting activists.

The good news is that activists might now be dialing back their tech activity overall. Besides obvious reasons like declining returns/poor performance for this asset class, many tech incumbents that would otherwise be attractive activist targets are on the other side of the activist cash curve. Or as I like to think of it, they’ve already “given at the office” — most of them survived the activist cashectomy by returning cash to their investors in the form of dividends and buybacks, or by splitting themselves (as eBay and HP did). Which means those companies’ boards now have the freedom to re-constitute their shareholder base and pursue a growth agenda.

In fact, the M&A activity reveals a number of strategic growth deals on the heels of requited activist campaigns. Post-split, we’ve seen eBay make two acquisitions (Cargigi, Twice); Paypal make three (Cyactive, Modest, Xoom); and HPE make three of its own as well (Aruba, Contextream, Stackato). And maybe it was mere coincidence, but within days of notorious activist investor Carl Icahn announcing that he had fully exited Apple stock, Tim Cook announced Apple’s $1 billion investment in Didi Chuxing.

So the sky appears to be clearing when it comes to activists. But what then of the argument that regardless of the broader macro and incumbent picture, SaaS is inherently harder to acquire than classic on-premise software companies? Besides the evidence of $8.6 billion SaaS deals in the past 30 days, my experience on the other side — not just as an investor but as a former manager of HP’s global software support business — suggests that isn’t a likely deterrent to M&A.

While it’s true that it requires a higher customer success standard to be a SaaS vendor — you have to support a run-time environment for your customers instead of dumping on-prem software onto the company’s IT operations team to manage — it’s actually easier to integrate SaaS companies when it comes to acquisitions. Why? Because of the “versioning debt” problem inherent in the on-premise alternative. Simply put, on-prem software requires huge engineering, support, and professional services costs to maintain multiple, legacy versions of the software. And, perhaps more significantly, these costs become multiplicative when you add in acquisitions.

At HP, we had to support ‘n’ versions of every legacy product family — not just HP’s own Openview system, but products acquired from Opsware (which was how I came to HP), Mercury Interactive, Peregrine Systems, SPI Dynamics, and so on — each with its own unique configurations, integrations, and supporting back-end systems. The compatibility matrix of supported combinations made Microsoft’s massive device driver library look like a beach-read novelette!

Software as a service mostly rids us of the versioning debt problem

SaaS mostly rids us of the versioning debt problem by shifting the onus from the customer to the vendor, who determines the size of the compatibility matrix. (Not to mention that the SaaS vendor also has the data across multiple clients to make sure things really work given the inherent multi-tenant architecture of SaaS).

None of this is meant to trivialize the support required of SaaS vendors to ensure customer success, but it does reduce a barrier to M&A activity relative to traditional on-premise solutions. And owning the responsibility for the success of your customers — as SaaS vendors must do — is a great form of long-term customer-relationship management and stickiness. Instead of sitting on the shelf unused as often happens with on-prem software, SaaS products are actually used — tying the runtime success of the customer to the success of the vendor. There’s no better example of an alignment in incentives that ensures SaaS M&A would be more successful in the long run.

* * *

Ultimately, when it comes to software, SaaS, or any other M&A it’s useful to view it through the lens of “growth or non-growth?”; we can’t treat both the same when it comes to objectives and outcomes. You can’t judge a SaaS deal book by its cover.

And only time will tell whether “growth” M&A among the tech incumbents is on the rise — or whether the activity of the past 30 days is simply a flickering mirage in a long-dry desert. But, if conditions remain ripe and the activist barrier is indeed on the decline, growth may be on the horizon.

Scott Kupor is the managing partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. This post originally appeared on Andreessen Horowitz. It is reprinted here with permission.

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"Software eating the world" is the basic philosophy behind all of Andreessen Horowitz's investments. But the Silicon Valley VC has a few specific areas of tech that are lighting up its radar right now.

With $1.5 billion in a new fund to invest in startups, managing partner Scott Kupor told Business Insider about a few areas the firm is super excited about:

• Machine learning and artificial intelligence: "The applications are all across the board," Kupor said. Chris Dixon led the firm's investment in Comma.Ai, a self-driving car and artificial intelligence startup. Now it's looking for more companies that are using machine learning to drive decisions.
• Virtual reality: Andreessen Horowitz already made one successful investment in Oculus, which sold to Facebook for $2 billion. Now, it's looking at companies that are making VR content. "That's an area where we've been spending a lot of time and you'll see us do more there now that the platforms are kind of established," Kupor said. Beyond content, the firm is also looking for companies who are applying virtual reality to industries in ways it hasn't seen before. 

• Enterprise infrastructure:"We continue to think we're at the early stages of what's really the transformation happening of enterprise IT. So you're going to be seeing us doing a lot more storage companies, networking countries, infrastructure applications... All this stuff where you have enterprise buyers on the other end," Kupor said. Andreessen Horowitz added Martin Casado as a general partner in February to help leads its investments in the enterprise space.
• Financial services: Historically, this hasn't a big space for the firm, but it brought on Alex Rampell to oversee its investments in fintech. "You'll see us do things around the lending space, potentially insurance, other things that are happening in financial services we think is really interesting," Kupor said.

While Kupor called out these four areas specifically, it doesn't mean the firm is not interested in any company that falls outside the categories. The firm is still looking for entrepreneurs with big ideas that have the software to back it. "For us, we're always looking for companies where software is the differentiating factor of the business," Kupor said. "It's dangerous in this business to red-line areas."

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Move Loot, the startup that wanted to take on Craigslist with a better service for selling furniture, is winding down operations and is in acquisition talks with a "symbiotic" company.

The company stopped letting users post new items to its online marketplace in late May. Customer complaints on Twitter allege that the site has failed to deliver recently purchased items, and all of the items on the site are no longer eligible for delivery. The company hasn't responded to many users except to say that there has been a "site issue". 

Bill Bobbitt, Move Loot's CEO and cofounder, told Business Insider that the San Francisco-based startup is currently in acquisition talks but wouldn't provide more details.

"We built Move Loot to make buying and selling furniture a seamless and enjoyable experience, and we have grown to help people all across the country furnish and transition their homes," Bobbitt wrote in an email to Business Insider. "We are currently in full acquisition talks join forces with another symbiotic company, and we hope to be able to share more news within a few weeks."

The startup has been shopping around its customer email list to potential buyers, a source familiar with the matter told Business Insider.

Big backers

The company has raised about $22 million from investors including Google Ventures, First Round Capital, Index Ventures, Y Combinator and Metamorphic Ventures.

Move Loot was founded in 2013 to reinvent how people buy and sell their furniture. Instead of bad Craigslist postings that resulted in hard-to-coordinate pick-ups and deliveries, Move Loot's solution was to take the furniture off your hands, professionally photograph it, and deliver it once the sale was complete. Move Loot's money came from taking a cut of the profits.

But, the business model had some problems.

In November, the company broadened its marketplace so that other stores, like a local antique shop, could post their items. In March, it switched to a model where anyone could upload their own photographs to the site, then Move Loot would only take care of the delivery part. The change also corresponded with the company going national through a partnership with a shipping platform. Its "white-glove" service of pick-up and delivery was only available in a few cities, but customers anywhere could choose to pay extra for shipping outside of those zones. 

Since the expansion, no business news has been posted on the site's blog. The company stopped tweeting on May 13, other than a few replies to the growing chorus of upset customers.

Customers have accused MoveLoot on Twitter of taking their money and failing to deliver the items. Other sellers remain frustrated that the marketplace closed with no warning, leaving them in a lurch when trying to move out.  The phone number that it had given out on Twitter for customer support now has a voicemail saying that phone support is no longer available. 

 Bobbit told Business Insider that "our customers are our absolute top priority and we care deeply about every one of them. Our team is in the process of reaching out to every person who has contacted customer service to ensure that any issues have been resolved."

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Tennis star Andy Murray has invested in three more UK startups via crowdfunding platform Seedrs.

Seedrs announced on Monday that the Olympic gold medal winner has put an undisclosed amount of money into cycle navigation app Beeline, pet monitoring app Dog Tracker Nano, and "beauty on demand" service blow LTD.

Murray, who has been in a "strategic partnership" with Seedrs since June 2015, has now backed a total of 15 early stage companies through Seedrs, including these five that were announced in February 2016.

"Giving recognition and support to British entrepreneurs is really important to me, especially those who are the driving force behind growth-focused businesses," Murray said in a statement.

"Every one of these entrepreneurs is passionate and dedicated to succeeding and I’m excited to have invested in their future growth."

The Seedrs platform allows people to invest upwards of £10,000 into companies that they like the look of in exchange for a chunk of equity.

Seedrs founder and CEO Jeff Lynn added: "It’s great to see Andy supporting entrepreneurs so actively on Seedrs by investing in another three businesses today. Andy is a great example of an investor who understands early stage investment and the importance of building a diverse investment portfolio aligned with a wider investment strategy."

Seedrs has funded over 350 deals to date and has had over £130 million invested into campaigns on the platform.

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While the tech world is fawning over Apple's WWDC conference— or still recovering from the shock of Microsoft buying LinkedIn — startups are slipping out bad news during the busy news cycle.

On Monday, Storehouse and ThinkUp announced that they're shutting down.

Storehouse, an app that helped people build and publish their own stories, will shut down on July 15, according to a company blog post.

"While we are very proud of what we accomplished, we were unable to achieve the type of growth necessary to justify the continued operation of the service," its CEO, Mark Kawano, wrote.

The startup had raised $8.5 million from investors, including SV Angel, True Ventures, and Sherpa Capital.

ThinkUp will shut down on July 18, according to its farewell post by CEO Anil Dash. The company would analyze users' Facebook and Twitter connections to draw insights about their social networks, but it struggled after Facebook and Instagram limited API access.

"There have been significant changes from Instagram, Twitter and Facebook that make it too hard for us to keep the service running, especially since we've been struggling as a business. We're sorry, and we're going to try to handle this shutdown the right way," Dash wrote in a Medium post.

Other startups facing a tough funding environment are looking to acquisitions as an out. Move Loot, a Craigslist competitor, is in talks for a "symbiotic" acquisition, the company told Business Insider.

SEE ALSO: Move Loot, the startup that wanted to dethrone Craigslist as the go-to place to sell furniture, is now in acquisition talks

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FanDuel, a one-day fantasy sports startup founded in Edinburgh, is planning to launch its platform in the UK this summer.

The company — valued at over a billion dollars, thereby making it a "unicorn"— allows people to create fantasy NFL (American football), MLB (baseball), NBA (basketball), and NHL (hockey) teams and enter them into leagues where they can win cash prizes. It has attracted over 1 million paid users and raised $361 million (£255 million) from investors.

But FanDuel, founded in 2009, has been slow to launch a product that caters to its home market of the UK. That's about to change.

"We’re launching this year in the UK," said FanDuel cofounder Lesley Eccles at The Europas tech conference in London on Tuesday.

FanDuel is planning to launch a football (or soccer) version of its platform in the UK this August, just in time for the launch of the Barclays Premier League 2016/2017 season.

It is currently trialling a beta version of its football offering with a couple of hundred people. The beta version is catered towards the Euros.

Details on how a Premier League version of FanDuel might work are scarce right now but it's likely that it would allow Premier League fans to pay to create fantasy teams that they can enter into a league with friends and/or other FanDuel users with the potential to win money

Eccles declined to comment on the rumours that FanDuel is about to merge with rival DraftKings.

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The chance of music identification service Shazam working out was just 4%, Shazam cofounder Dhiraj Mukherjee said on Wednesday.

Speaking at the Startup Grind Europe conference in London, Mukherjee said he calculated the figure in the company's early days after realising that the chances of creating Shazam's complex technology was just 25%, while the chances of "finding all the music" was around 30%. 

"We were writing business plans and financial models and projecting revenues of hundreds of millions of dollars long before we had the technology," admitted Mukherjee, who now works at Virgin Money, where he's head of banking innovation.

Shazam was founded in 2000, one year before the dot.com bubble burst. "There was blood on the streets and we needed to raise $8.5 million (£5.9 million) on the back of a powerpoint and a demo," said Mukherjee.

Fortunately for Shazam, the company was able to raise the funding it needed, although it wasn't easy, according to Mukherjee. "There were 53 VCs in London and 50 of them rejected us," he said.

Jump forward to 2016 and Shazam has raised more than $136 million (£96 million) and is valued at over $1 billion (£704 million). It has over 100 million monthly active users and has been used on more than 500 million mobile devices. 

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Food delivery service Deliveroo nearly started out as a company called "Boozefood," according to Deliveroo cofounder and CEO Will Shu.

Speaking on stage at the Startup Grind conference in London, Shu said Boozefood was "the initial permutation" for Deliveroo.

The basic premise of Boozefood was to deliver food to people late in the evening when they got home after a few drinks. It's unclear whether Boozefood would have delivered high-quality restaurant standard food or the kebabs that people often crave at the end of a night out.

In a follow up Q&A, Shu told Business Insider that Boozefood never actually launched. "It was a joke to deliver food to people when they come home from the pub," said the former Morgan Stanley investment banker.

Founded in 2012, Deliveroo has raised $200 million (£140 million) from big name venture capital firms like Index and Accel for its food delivery service, which is now available in around 70 cities available across 12 countries.

The company operates in a busy food delivery market that is also being targeted by US tech giants like Amazon and Uber.

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Venture capital firm Draper Esprit raised over £100 million in a rare VC stock market listing on Wednesday.

The London-based company, which has invested in healthy snack food startup Graze and fashion website Lyst, raised a total of £103 million across two stock markets: The London Stock Exchange and The Irish Stock Exchange.

Shares were issued at 300 pence each and climbed to highs of 312 pence. They were trading at 306 pence each at market close on Thursday.

Draper said it plans to use the proceeds of the listing to provide development and expansion capital to companies in its existing investment portfolio.

The move is unusual given that VCs typically raise money through a limited partnership (LP) model, where the LPs entrust the VCs to put their money into growing technology companies that will significantly increase in value over time.

Simon Cook, chief executive and cofounder of Draper Esprit, said in a statement:

Our motivation for evolving our Venture Capital business model was twofold. Firstly, we wanted to be able to invest for longer in our emerging companies and to be able to build bigger stakes as companies remained private for longer periods, capturing more value for shareholders. Secondly, we wanted to further democratise funding for entrepreneurs.

Traditionally the Limited Partnership model in Europe has restricted who can invest in venture capital backed companies and many growing technology companies are not accessible to institutions or public investors until they go public. Now everyone can participate in the growth of VC backed companies from their earliest stages through series A and B to their success in the later stages up to and including their IPO.

Draper said it has been involved in investing over $1 billion (£705 million) into more than 200 technology businesses and has been linked to businesses with a total aggregate value of over $8 billion (£5.6 billion), with an exited value of over $6 billion (£4.2 billion).

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