Customer engagement platform Freshworks today announced that it has acquired AnsweriQ, a startup that provides AI tools for self-service solutions and agent-assisted use cases where the ultimate goal is to quickly provide customers with answers and make agents more efficient.

The companies did not disclose the acquisition price. AnsweriQ last raised a funding round in 2017, when it received $5 million in a Series A round from Madrona Venture Group.

Freshworks founder and CEO Girish Mathrubootham tells me that he was introduced to the company through a friend, but that he had also previously come across AnsweriQ as a player in the customer service automation space for large clients in high-volume call centers.

“We really liked the team and the product and their ability to go up-market and win larger deals,” Mathrubootham said. “In terms of using the AI/ML customer service, the technology that they’ve built was perfectly complementary to everything else that we were building.”

He also noted the client base, which doesn’t overlap with Freshworks’, and the talent at AnsweriQ, including the leadership team, made this a no-brainer.

AnsweriQ, which has customers that use Freshworks and competing products, will continue to operate its existing products for the time being. Over time, Freshworks, of course, hopes to convert many of these users into Freshworks users as well. The company also plans to integrate AnsweriQ’s technology into its Freddy AI engine. The exact branding for these new capabilities remains unclear, but Mathrubootham suggested FreshiQ as an option.

As for the AnsweriQ leadership team, CEO Pradeep Rathinam will be joining Freshworks as chief customer officer.

Rathinam told me that the company was at the point where he was looking to raise the next round of funding. “As we were going to raise the next round of funding, our choices were to go out and raise the next round and go down this path, or look for a complementary platform on which we can vet our products and then get faster customer acquisition and really scale this to hundreds or thousands of customers,” he said.

He also noted that as a pure AI player, AnsweriQ had to deal with lots of complex data privacy and residency issues, so a more comprehensive platform like Freshworks made a lot of sense.

Freshworks has always been relatively acquisitive. Last year, the company acquired the customer success service Natero, for example. With the $150 million Series H round it announced last November, the company now also has the cash on hand to acquire even more customers. Freshworks is currently valued at about $3.5 billion and has 2,7000 employees in 13 offices. With the acquisition of AnsweriQ, it now also has a foothold in Seattle, which it plans to use to attract local talent to the company.

Much like private businesses, the United States government is in the process of moving workloads to the cloud, and facing a similar set of challenges. Today, CircleCI, the continuous delivery developer service, announced a partnership with AWS GovCloud to help federal government entities using AWS’s government platform to modernize their applications development workflows.

“What this means is that it allows us to run our server offering, which is our on-prem offering, and our government customers can run that on dedicated pure cloud resource [on AWS GovCloud],” CircleCI CEO Jim Rose told TechCrunch.

GovCloud is a dedicated, single tenant cloud platform that lets government entities build FedRAMP-compliant secure cloud solutions (other cloud vendors have similar offerings). FedRAMP is a set of government cloud security standards every cloud vendor has to meet to work with the federal government

CircleCI builds modern continuous delivery/continuous integration (CI/CD) pipelines for development teams pushing changes to the application in a rapid change cycle.

“What GovCloud allows us to do is now provide that same level of security and service for government customers that wanted us to do so in an on prem environment in a dedicated single tenant environment [in the cloud],” Rose explained.

While there are a number of steps involved in building cloud applications, Rose said they are sticking to their core strength around building continuous delivery pipelines. As he says, if you have a legacy mainframe application that changes once every year or two, using CircleCI wouldn’t make sense, but as you begin to modernize, that’s where his company could help.

“[CircleCi comes into play] when you get into more modern cloud applications that are changing in some cases hundreds of times a day, and the sources of change for those applications is getting really diverse and managing that is becoming more complex,” Rose said.

This partnership could involve working directly with an agency, as it has done with the Small Business Administration (SBA), or it might involve a systems integrator, or even AWS, inviting them to be part of a larger RFP.

Rose says he realizes that working with the government can sometimes be controversial. Companies from Chef to Salesforce to Google have run afoul with employees who don’t want to work with certain agencies like DoD or ICE. He says his company has tended to focus on areas where agencies are looking to improve citizen interactions and steered away from other areas.

“From our perspective, given that we’re not super involved in a lot of those areas, but we want to get in front of it, both commercially, as well as on the government side, and determine what falls within the fence line and what’s outside of it,” he said.

To ward off a hostile takeover bid by Xerox, which is a much smaller company, HP (not to be confused with Hewlett Packard Enterprise, a separate public company) is promising its investors billions and billions of dollars.

All investors have to do to get the goods is reject the Xerox deal.

In a letter to investors, HP called Xerox’s offer a “flawed value exchange” that would lead to an “irresponsible capital structure” that was being sold on “overstated synergies.” Here’s what HP is promising its owners if they do allow it to stay independent:

• About $16 billion worth of “capital return” between its fiscal 2020 and fiscal 2022 (HP’s Q1 fiscal 2020 wrapped January 31, 2020, for reference). According to the company, the figure “represents approximately 50% of HP’s current market capitalization.” TechCrunch rates that as true, before the company’s share-price gains posted after this news became known.
• That capital return would be made up of a few things, including boosting the company’s share repurchase program to $15 billion (up from $5 billion, previously). More specifically, HP intends to “repurchase of at least $8 billion of HP shares over 12 months” after its fiscal 2020 meeting. The company also intends to raise its “target long-term return of capital to 100% of free cash flow generation,” allowing for the share purchases and a rising dividend payout (“HP intends to maintain dividend per share growth at least in line with earnings.”)

If all that read like a foreign language, let’s untangle it a bit. What HP is telling investors is that it intends to use all of the cash it generates to reward their ownership of shares in its business. This will come in the form of buybacks (concentrating future earnings on fewer shares, raising the value of held equity) and dividends (rising payouts to owners as HP itself makes more money), powered in part by cost-cutting (boosting cash generation and profitability).

HP is saying, in effect: Please do not sell us to Xerox; if you do not, we will do all that we can to make you money. 

Shares of HP are up 6% as of the time of writing, raising the value of HP’s consumer-focused spinout to just under $34 billion. We’ll see what investors choose for the company. But now, how did we get here?

The road to today

You may ask yourself, how did we get here (to paraphrase Talking Heads). It all began last Fall when Xerox made it known that it wanted to merge with HP, offering in the range of $27 billion to buy the much larger company. As we wrote at the time:

What’s odd about this particular deal is that HP is the company with a much larger market cap of $29 billion, while Xerox is just a tad over $8 billion. The canary is eating the cat here.

HP never liked the idea of the hostile takeover attempt and the gloves quickly came off as the two companies wrangled publicly with one another, culminating with HP’s board unanimously rejecting Xerox’s offer. It called the financial underpinnings of the deal “highly conditional and uncertain.” HP also was unhappy with the aggressive nature of the offer, writing that Xerox was, “intent on forcing a potential combination on opportunistic terms and without providing adequate information.”

Just one day later, Xerox responded, saying it would take the bid directly to HP shareholders in an attempt to by-pass the board of directors, writing in yet another public letter, “We plan to engage directly with HP shareholders to solicit their support in urging the HP Board to do the right thing and pursue this compelling opportunity.”

In January, the shenanigans continued when Xerox announced it was putting forth a friendly slate of candidates for the HP board to replace the ones that had rejected the earlier Xerox offer. And more recently, in an attempt to convince shareholders to vote in favor of the deal, Xerox sweetened the deal to $34 billion or $24 a share.

Xerox wrote that it had on-going conversations with large HP shareholders, and this might have gotten HP’s attention— hence the most recent offer on its part to make an offer to shareholders that would be hard to refuse. The company’s next shareholder meeting is taking place in April when we will finally find out the final reckoning.

Laiye, a Chinese startup that offers robotic process automation services to several major tech firms in the nation and government agencies, has raised $42 million in a new funding round as it looks to scale its business.

The new financing round, Series C, was co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Lightspeed China Partners. Cathay Innovation, which led the startup’s Series B+ round and Wu Capital, which led the Series B round, also participated in the new round.

China has been the hub for some of the cheapest labor in the world. But in recent years, a number of companies and government agencies have started to improve their efficiency with the help of technology.

That’s where Laiye comes into play. Robotic process automation (RPA) allows software to mimic several human behaviors such as keyboard strokes and mouse clicks.

“For instance, a number of banks did not previously offer APIs, so humans had to sign in and fetch the data and then feed it into some other software. Processes like these could be automated by our platform,” said Arvid Wang, co-founder and co-chief executive of Laiye, in an interview with TechCrunch.

The four-and-a-half-year-old startup, which has raised more than $100 million to date, will use the fresh capital to hire talent from across the globe and expand its services. “We believe robotic process automation will achieve its full potential when it combines AI and the best human talent,” he said.

Laiye’s announcement today comes as the market for robotic automation process is still in nascent stage in China. There are a handful of startups looking into this space, but Laiye, which counts Microsoft as an investor, and Sequoia-backed UiPath are the two clear leaders in the market.

As my colleague Rita Liao wrote last year, it was only recently that some entrepreneurs and investors in China started to shift their attention from consumer-facing products to business applications.

Globally, RPA has emerged as the fastest growing market in enterprise space. A Gartner report found last year that RPA market grew over 63% in 2018. Recent surveys have shown that most enterprises in China today are also showing interest in enhancing their RPA projects and AI capabilities.

Laiye today has more than 200 partners and more than 200,000 developers have registered to use its multilingual UiBot RPA platform. UiBot enables integration with Laiye’s native and third-party AI capabilities such as natural language processing, optical character recognition, computer vision, chatbot and machine learning.

“We are very bullish on China, and the opportunities there are massive,” said Lightspeed partner Amy Wu in an interview. “Laiye is doing phenomenally there, and with this new fundraise, they can look to expand globally,” she said.

We all know the cloud infrastructure market is extremely lucrative; analyst firm Canalys reports that the sector reached $30.2 billion in revenue for Q4 2019.

Cloud numbers are hard to parse because companies often lump cloud revenue into a single bucket regardless of whether it’s generated by infrastructure or software. What’s interesting about Canalys’s numbers is that it attempts to measure the pure infrastructure results themselves without other cloud incomes mixed in:

As an example, Microsoft reported $12.5 billion in total combined cloud revenue for the quarter, but Canalys estimates that just $5.3 billion comes from infrastructure (Azure). Amazon has the purest number with $9.8 billion of a reported $9.95 billion attributed to its infrastructure business. This helps you understand why in spite of the fact that Microsoft reported bigger overall cloud earnings numbers and a higher growth rate, Amazon still has just less than double Microsoft’s market share in terms of IaaS spend.

That’s not to say Microsoft didn’t still have a good quarter — it garnered 17.6% of revenue for the period. That’s up from 14.5% in the same quarter a year ago. What’s more, Amazon lost a bit of ground, according to Canalys, dropping from 33.4% in Q4 2018 to 32.4% in the most recent quarter.

Part of the reason for that is because Microsoft is growing at close to twice the rate as Amazon — 62.3% versus Amazon’s 33.2%.

Meanwhile, number-three vendor Google came in at $1.8 billion for pure infrastructure revenue, good for 6% of the market, up from 4.9% a year ago on growth rate 67.6%. Google reported $2.61 billion in overall cloud revenue, but that included software. Despite the smaller results, it was a good quarter for the Mountain View-based company.