With the company growing in leaps and bounds, Zoom went shopping for a cloud infrastructure vendor to help it with its growing scale problem. In a surprising choice, the company went with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Zoom has become the go-to video conferencing service as much of the world has shut down due to the pandemic, and life needs to go on somehow. It has gone on via video conferencing with Zoom growing from 200 million active users in February to 300 million in March. That kind of growth puts a wee bit of pressure on your infrastructure, and Zoom clearly needed to beef up its game.

What’s surprising is that it chose Oracle, a company whose infrastructure market share registers as a strong niche player in Synergy Research’s latest survey in February. It is well behind market leaders including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and even IBM (and that’s saying something).

Brent Leary, who is founder at CRM Essentials, says he sees this as a move to show that Zoom can move beyond the SMB market to power enterprise customers, no matter what they demand.

“I think Zoom went with Oracle because they are proven in the enterprise in terms of mission critical apps built on Oracle databases running on Oracle hardware in the cloud. Zoom needs to prove to enterprises that they are able to handle scale and data security needed to beyond what SMBs typically require,” Leary told TechCrunch.

In addition, Leary speculated that Oracle might have given Zoom a good deal to get a hot company into the fold and beat rivals like Amazon and Microsoft.

It’s worth noting that CNBC reported a couple of weeks ago that Oracle chairman Larry Ellison called Zoom an “essential service” for his business, as well as others. It certainly seems in hindsight that was hardly a coincidence, as he was praising up his new prize customer.

Others have speculated that it might have to do with keeping business away from a potential rival given that Amazon with Chime, Google with Hangouts and Microsoft with Teams all have competing products. However, none of them have become synonymous with online meetings as Zoom has during this crisis.

Zoom went public last year and has become the darling of the video conference market since in spite of a set of security issues that have developed as the company scaled, which they have been working to address.

The stock market is apparently not impressed with the choice. As we went to publish, the stock was down 3.38% or $5.56.

The world has been turned upside down the past few weeks, but one lesson of business remains as important as ever: treating your customers well is the best avenue to future business strength, particularly at a moment of extreme stress.

As businesses come to terms with the economic crisis underway, executives are moving resources from customer acquisition to customer retention — and that’s proving very lucrative to startups that service the customer success market.

Case in point: New York City-based Catalyst, which I profiled just last summer following its $15 million Series A led by Accel’s Vas Natarajan, has seen huge revenue growth the past few months. The data-driven customer success platform has seen its revenue grow by 380% since the Series A financing according to CEO Edward Chiu.

Steep revenue growth is (unsurprisingly) attractive to investors, and in a moment of fortuitous timing, the company signed a $25 million Series B term sheet with Spark Capital just as the COVID-19 crisis was getting underway.

Chiu said Catalyst wasn’t seeking the investment, having much of its Accel round still in the bank, but he ultimately decided that having the extra capital in hand through a looming economic recession was the right decision. The capital officially hit the bank account at the end of March, and was led by the firm’s growth investor Will Reed.

While the company didn’t disclose the valuation, a source with knowledge of the matter quoted a valuation of $125 million. That’s a serious valuation for a company that launched just two years ago in April of 2018.

Outside of more funding, the core story of the company’s product remains the same. Catalyst wants to bring together all the data sources and team members who interact with customers — everyone from designers and engineers to customer success managers — into one dashboard to ensure that everyone has accurate and up-to-date access to all the information they need on the health of every customer.

The one airbrush: the company’s previous URL of getcatalyst.io has become catalyst.io, and officially re-launched this morning.

One growth area that the company is exploring outside of the B2B space of its existing customers is in healthcare, where the company has seen some inbound interest. Chiu says that Catalyst is exploring the steps required to reach HIPAA compliance with its platform, and hopes to expand to more sectors over time with the capital from its Series B.

The Catalyst team. Photo via Catalyst.

When we last checked in with the company, Catalyst had 19 employees and was targeting 40 employees by July 2020. Chiu said that Catalyst is already at 35 employees, and will likely hit 60 to 70 employees by the end of the year.

A startup that’s hoping to be a contender in the very large and fragmented market of human resources software has captured the eye of a big investor out of the US and become its first investment in Spain.

Barcelona-based Factorial, which is building an all-in-one HR automation platform aimed at small and medium businesses that manages payroll, employee onboarding, time off and other human resource functions, has raised €15 ($16 million) in a Series A round of funding led by CRV, with participation also from existing investors Creandum, Point Nine and K Fund.

The money comes on the heels of Factorial — which has customers in 40 countries — seeing eightfold growth in revenues in 2019, with more than 60,000 customers now using its tools.

Jordi Romero, the CEO who co-founded the company with Pau Ramon (CTO) and Bernat Farrero (head of corporate), said in an interview that the investment will be used both to expand to new markets and add more customers, as well as to double down on tech development to bring on more features. These will include RPA integrations to further automate services, and to move into more back-office product areas such as handling expenses,

Factorial has now raised $18 million and is not disclosing its valuation, he added.

The funding is notable on a couple of levels that speak not just to the wider investing climate but also to the specific area of human resources.

In addition to being CRV’s first deal in Spain, the investment is being made at a time when the whole VC model is under a lot of pressure because of the global coronavirus pandemic — not least in Spain, which has a decent, fledgling technology scene but has been one of the hardest-hit countries in the world when it comes to COVID-19.

“It made the closing of the funding very, very stressful,” Romero said from Barcelona last week (via video conference). “We had a gentleman’s agreement [so to speak] before the virus broke out, but the money was still to be wired. Seeing the world collapse around you, with some accounts closing, and with the bigger business world in a very fragile state, was very nerve wracking.”

Ironically, it’s that fragile state that proved to be a saviour of sorts for Factorial.

“We target HR leaders and they are currently very distracted with furloughs and layoffs right now, so we turned around and focused on how we could provide the best value to them,” Romero said.

The company made its product free to use until lockdowns are eased up, and Factorial has found a new interest from businesses that had never used cloud-based services before but needed to get something quickly up and running to use while working from home. He noted that among new companies signing up to Factorial, most either previously kept all their records in local files or at best a “Dropbox folder, but nothing else.”

The company also put in place more materials and other tools specifically to address the most pressing needs those HR people might have right now, such as guidance on how to implement furloughs and layoffs, best practices for communication policies and more. “We had to get creative,” Romero said.

At $16 million, this is at the larger end of Series A rounds as of January 2020, and while it’s definitely not as big as some of the outsized deals we’ve seen out of the US, it happens to be the biggest funding round so far this year in Spain.

Its rise feels unlikely for another reason, too: it comes at a time when we already have dozens (maybe even hundreds) of human resources software businesses, with many an established name — they include PeopleHR, Workday, Infor, ADP, Zenefits, Gusto, IBM, Oracle, SAP, Rippling, and many others — in a market that analysts project will be worth $38.17 billion by 2027 growing at a CAGR of over 11%.

But as is often the case in tech, status quo breeds disruption, and that’s the case here. Factorial’s approach has been to build HR tools specifically for people who are not HR professionals per se: companies that are small enough not to have specialists, or if they do, they share a lot of the tasks and work with other managers who are not in HR first and foremost.

It’s a formula that Romero said could potentially see the company taking on bigger customers, but for now, investors like it for having built a platform approach for the huge but often under-served SME market.

“Factorial was built for the users, designed for the modern web and workplace,” said Reid Christian, General Partner at CRV, in a statement. “Historically the HR software market has been one of the most lucrative categories for enterprise tech companies, and today, the HR stack looks much different. As we enter the third generation of cloud HR products, with countless point solutions, there’s a strong need for an underlying platform to integrate work across these.”

Miro is a company in the right place at the right time. The makers of a digital whiteboard are seeing usage surge right now as businesses move from the workplace and physical whiteboards. Today, the company announced a hefty $50 million Series B.

Iconiq Capital led the round with help from Accel and a slew of individual investors. Today’s investment brings the total raised to around $75 million, according to the company. Among the company’s angel investors was basketball star Steph Curry.

What’s attracting this level of investment is that this is a product made for a moment when workers are forced to stay home. One of the primary complaints about working at home is the inability to sit in the same room with colleagues and brainstorm around a whiteboard. This reproduces that to an extent.

What’s more, Miro isn’t simply light-weight add-in like you might find built into a collaboration tool like Zoom or Microsoft Teams; it’s more of a platform play designed to integrate with many different enterprise tools, much like Slack does for communications.

Miro co-founder and CEO Andrey Khusid said the company planned the platform idea from its earliest days. “The concept from day one was building something for real-time collaboration and the platform thing is very important because we expect that people will build on top of our product,” Khusid told TechCrunch.

Image Credit: Miro

That means that people can build integrations to other common tools and customize the base tool to meet the needs of an individual team or organization. It’s an approach that seems to be working as the company reports it’s profitable with more than 21,000 customers including 80% of the Fortune 100. Customers include Netflix, Salesforce, PwC, Spotify, Expedia and Deloitte.

Khusid says usage has been skyrocketing among both business and educational customers as the pandemic has forced millions of people to work at home. He says that has been a challenge for his engineering team to keep up with the demand, but one that the company has been able to meet to this point.

The startup just passed the 300 employee mark this week, and it will continue to hire with this new influx of money. Khusid expects to have another 150 employees before the end of the year to keep up with increasing demand for the product.

“We understand that we need to come out strong from this situation. The company is growing much faster than we expected, so we need to have a very strong team to maintain the growth at the same pace after the crisis ends.”

M&A has largely slowed down in the current market, but there remain pockets of activity when the timing and price are right. Today, Medallia — a customer experience platform that scans online reviews, social media, and other sources to provide better insights into what a company is doing right and wrong and what needs to get addressed — announced that it would acquire Voci Technologies, a speech-to-text startup, for $59 million in cash.

Medallia plans to integrate the startup’s AI technology so that voice-based interactions — for example from calls into call centers — can be part of the data crunched by its analytics platform. Despite the rise of social media, messaging channels, and (currently) a shift for people to do a lot more online, voice still accounts for the majority of customer interactions for a business, so this is an important area for Medallia to tackle.

“Voci transcribes 100% of live and recorded calls into text that can be analyzed quickly to determine customer satisfaction, adding a powerful set of signals to the Medallia Experience Cloud,” said Leslie Stretch, president and CEO of Medallia, in a statement. “At the same time, Voci enables call analysis moments after each interaction has completed, optimizing every aspect of call center operations securely. Especially important as virtual and remote contact center operations take shape.”

While there are a lot of speech-to-text offerings in the market today, the key with Voci is that it is able to discern a number of other details in the call, including emotion, gender, sentiment, and voice biometric identity. It’s also able to filter out personal identifiable information to ensure more privacy around using the data for further analytics.

Voci started life as a spinout from Carnegie Mellon University (its three founders were all PhDs from the school), and it had raised a total of about $18 million from investors that included Grotech Ventures, Harbert Growth Parnters, and the university itself. It was last valued at $28 million in March 2018 (during a Series B raise), meaning that today’s acquisition was slightly more than double that value.

The company seems to have been on an upswing with its business. Voci has to date processed some 2 billion minutes of speech, and in January, the company published some momentum numbers that said bookings had grown some 63% in the last quarter, boosted by contact center customers.

In addition to contact centers, the company catered to companies in finance, healthcare, insurance and others areas of business process outsourcing, although it does not disclose names. As with all companies and organizations that have products that cater to offering services remotely, Voci has seen stronger demand for its business in recent weeks, at a time when many have curtailed physical contact due to COVID-19-related movement restrictions.

“Our whole company is delighted to be joining forces with experience management leader Medallia. We are thrilled that Voci’s powerful speech to text capabilities will become part of Medallia Experience Cloud,” said Mike Coney, CEO of Voci, in a statement. “The consolidation of all contact center signals with video, survey and other critical feedback is a game changer for the industry.”

It’s not clear whether Voci had been trying to raise money in the last few months, or if this was a proactive approach from Medallia. But more generally, M&A has found itself in a particularly key position in the world of tech: startups are finding it more challenging right now to raise money, and one big question has been whether that will lead to more hail-mary-style M&A plays, as one route for promising businesses and technologies to avoid shutting down altogether.

For its part, Medallia, which went public in July 2019 after raising money from the likes of Sequoia, has seen its stock hit like the rest of the market in recent weeks. Its current market cap is at around $2.8 billion, just $400 million more than its last private valuation.

The deal is expected to close in May 2020, Medallia said.