Extra Crunch roundup: Toast and Freshworks S-1s, pre-pitch tips, flexible funding lessons

The digital transformation currently sweeping society has likely reached your favorite local restaurant. Since 2013, Boston-based Toast has offered bars and eateries a software platform that lets them manage orders, payments and deliveries. Over the last year, its customers have processed more than $38 billion in gross payment volume, so Alex Wilhelm analyzed the company’s […]

Sales experience platform Walnut raises $15M to improve product demonstrations

Walnut’s a no-code platform enables customers to create customized product demonstrations, integrate them into their sales and marketing processes and then generate insights from the demos.

Peak raises $75M for a platform that helps non-tech companies build AI applications

As artificial intelligence continues to weave its way into more enterprise applications, a startup that has built a platform to help businesses, especially non-tech organizations, build more customized AI decision making tools for themselves has picked up some significant growth funding. Peak AI, a startup out of Manchester, England, that has built a “decision intelligence” […]

Zoom announces first startups receiving funding from $100M investment fund

For more than a year now, Zoom has been on a mission to transform from an application into a platform. To that end it made three announcements last year: Zoom Apps development tools, the Zoom Apps marketplace and a $100 million development fund to invest in some of the more promising startups building tools on […]

How Amazon EC2 grew from a notion into a foundational element of cloud computing

Fifteen years ago this week on August 25, 2006, AWS turned on the very first beta instance of EC2, its cloud-based virtual computers. Today cloud computing, and more specifically infrastructure as a service, is a staple of how businesses use computing, but at that moment it wasn’t a well known or widely understood concept. The […]

Linux 5.14 set to boost future enterprise application security

Linux is set for a big release this Sunday August 29, setting the stage for enterprise and cloud applications for months to come. The 5.14 kernel update will include security and performance improvements. A particular area of interest for both enterprise and cloud users is always security and to that end, Linux 5.14 will help […]