King of Prussia-based Greenphire recieves growth investment from Riverside Company, but its not an acquistion

Tom Paine

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Greenphire, the King of Prussia-based SaaS clinical trial payments platform company, which I profiled in 2013, received an undisclosed growth investment from the Riverside Company, Cleveland-based Riverside announced today.

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Jones Day and Deloitte advised Riverside on the transaction and Ares Capital provided debt financing. Pepper Hamilton advised Greenphire.

Greenphire, founded in 2008, made the Inc. 5000 in 2013 with 2012 revenue of $5.4 million, and again in 2014 with 2013 revenue of $6.8 million, up from $803,000 in 2010.

“Software and Healthcare are two of Riverside’s most active specializations,” said Riverside Principal Joe Manning in a statement. “This investment exemplifies Riverside’s strategy of partnering with best-in-class companies with strong management teams.”

“Greenphire has experienced exponential growth each year since its inception. The management team has worked hard to grow while scaling its operations to ensure continued quality. After an extensive search for an investment partner, Greenphire was excited to select The Riverside Company as its partner to ensure continued success into the future,” said Greenphire CEO Samuel Whitaker in the same release.

Fortune's Term Sheet described the tranaction as an acquisition. Although not knowing the exact nature of the deal, Philly Tech News has learned that the transaction was an investment only, and not a full buyout. I couldn't confirm whether early investor FirstMark Capital, whose other Philly area investments included Boomi, Artisan Mobile, and Guru, had exited, as Term Sheet reported.

Last month, John Blakeley, who was formerly chief commercial officer at Greenphire, joined CRF Health in Plymouth Meeting as chief business officer.

The Riverside Company is a global private equity firm focused on acquiring and investing in growing businesses valued at up to $250 million.

Links 1/13/2015: EBay Enterprise making news; Instacart raises $220 million

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Concur: the $8.3 billion company that almost never was (Pudget Sound Business Journal)

Greenphire Receives Growth Investment (PR Newswire)
Fortune's Term Sheet describes it as acquisition; I'm not sure yet what version is correct.

Magento Expands Its Cloud-Based Commerce Ecosystem with Microsoft and Joyent (Business Wire)

EBay Unveils Retail Platform: All About Omni (Women's Wear Daily)

Mavenir to bolster telecom diameter signaling platform with Ulticom purchase (RCR Wireless)

Instacart, the grocery delivery startup, raises $220 million (Fortune)
Comcast Ventures one of several investors.

Q&A: How RelateIQ is filling the CRM gap for SMBs (ZDNet)

Adaptive Insights Makes Leadership Change With New CEO (Wall Street Journal: Venture Capital Dispatch)

IBM Introduces z13, a Mainframe for the Smartphone Economy (New York Times: Bits)


Conservatives Launch Ad Campaign Against Comcast/Time-Warner Merger (Bloomberg Politics)

Comcast-backed FanDuel Quadruples Revenue (Multichannel News)

Bentley Announces Acquisition of C3global and Its Amulet Operational Analytics (Bentley Systems)

Flatiron Health, Fort Washington-based National Comprehensive Cancer Network team up on oncology data

Tom Paine

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Flatiron Health, the New York City-based Cloud Oncology platform founded by Invite Media co-founders Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg, is teaming up with the Fort Washington-based National Comprehensive Cancer Network to create a cloud-based data repository of NCCN Member Institution data -- the NCCN Outcomes Database, the two organizations announced last week.

"Through this collaboration, electronic health record (EHR) data will be aggregated for cancer quality and outcomes assessment, as well as identification of key trends and patterns in the care of patients with cancer. Within this database, NCCN Member Institutions will have the opportunity to measure concordance to the NCCN Clinical Practice Guidelines in Oncology (NCCN Guidelines) and will be able to access OncoAnalytics, Flatiron Health's proprietary, cloud-based analytics tool," Flatiron and the NCCN said in a statement.

The resulting data will be available for member institution inquiries, as well as to external parties through a joint commercialization agreement between NCCN and Flatiron, according to the statement.

The National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) is a not-for-profit alliance of 25 of the world's leading cancer centers devoted to patient care, research, and education.

Flatiron Health, founded in 2012, has raised nearly $140 million in venture funding from firms including Laboratory Corporation of America, First Round Capital, and Google Ventures.

Turner and Weinberg founded web ad buying platform Invite Media, also backed by First Round Capital and launched in Philadelphia before moving to New York, and sold it to Google in 2010.

Links 1/12/2015: SAP preliminary earnings hold up; Is ADT Corp one of Zonoff's new investors?

SAP fourth-quarter profit holds up as cloud shift accelerates (Reuters)

SAP's preliminary earnings release
Cloud subscriptions and support still accounts for less than 7% of revenue.

SAP’s Sneak Peek of Q4 and Year-End Earnings: 4 Customer Takeaways (ASUG News)


Ellison's backing helps Kurian's star to rise at Oracle (Reuters)

PhillyDeals: Oracle has most job openings in Philly (Philly.com: Philly Deals)

IBM ushers in BIGGEST EVER re-org for the cloud era, say insiders (The Register)

CES Redux: State of the Smart Home Wars (Light Reading)
Is ADT Corp one of Zonoff's large new investors? Also, questions about Comcast's plans.


ModCloth Co-Founder Eric Koger Exits Role As CEO; Urban Outfitters’ Matthew Kaness Joins (TechCrunch)
First Round Capital was an early investor.

FCC ‘Peering’ Into Comcast-TWC (Multichannel News)

EMC Reaches Agreement With Investment Firm, Adds Two Directors (Re/code)

PipelineDeals raises $1 million Series A; HQ now in Seattle, though development still in Wayne

Tom Paine

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PipelineDeals, the SaaS CRM for small to medium sized business-to-business companies which I profiled a couple of years back, has raised its first outside funding, after nine years of bootstrapping. Its received a $1 million Series A from a group of Seattle-based angel investors.

Although it started in the Philadelphia area (Wayne), co-founder and CEO JP Werlin says it is now officially based in Seattle where its long had an office, according to the Seattle tech website GeekWire, although its development office remains in Wayne. PipelineDeals now has 25 employees, GeekWire says, and LinkedIn indicates that slightly less than half are in Wayne.

PipelineDeals team in Yellowstone at Summit 2014 / 
PipelineDeals website

Co-founder Nick Bertolino remains based in Wayne.


PipelineDeals made the 2014 Inc. 5000, as revenue reached $2.6 million in 2013, up from $989,000 in 2010. PipelineDeals offers a relatively low-priced ($24 per month per user), sales-focused CRM to serve a market it says Salesforce has largely abandoned. It says it has over 3000 customers.

Verizon says 40-hour outage was outage to end alll outages (The Register)

Extra Lives: Can GameStop Avoid Blockbuster's Fate? (Business Week)
Part of GameStop's legacy is its $1.5 billion purchase of Philly-based EB Games (Electronic Boutique) in 2005.

What Does "Big Data" Mean? A Cynic's Guide (ZDNet)

Philly Tech People News 1/11/2015: SAP adds two to Global Managing Board; Oracle names Kurian President

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Two Concur co-founders to leave following SAP acquisition (PC World)

SAP: Michael Kleinemeier and Steve Singh Join Global Managing Board (SAP News Release)


Oracle’s Kurian Is Said to Be Named as President of Product (Bloomberg)


CRF Health boosts leadership team (PMLive)

Halfpenny Technologies Names Carl Smith as Chief Financial Officer (Business Wire)

PHD IN COMPUTER SCIENCE CANDIDATE LU XIAO WINS FIRST PLACE IN STUDENT RESEARCH COMPETITION (Drexel College of Computing & Informatics)


Longtime TV reporter joins Temple to help journalism majors find jobs

Saturday Highlights: Lessons learned from AOL-Time Warner merger; On getting more cash out of SaaS

15 years later, lessons from the failed AOL-Time Warner merger (Fortune)
Must Read.

Getting More Cash Out Of SaaS: Timing Is Everything (TechCrunch)
By Nino Marakovic, CEO and managing director of Sapphire Ventures (formerly SAP Ventures).

Sometimes Cutting R&D Spending Can Yield More Innovation (Harvard Business Review)
Intersting article looking at R&D at Cisco, authored by Fox Business and St. Joes' profs.
As an aside, I've always questioned the accounting definition of R&D spending and what goes into it. If you look at IBM over the past 30 years or so, you wonder where the return on R&D is. They do some great stuff, of course, but its not clear how its contributed to market capitalization.
IBM has a market cap of $157 million, yet over the last 20 years its spent over $100 billion on R&D, and that excludes the billions its spent on acquisitions and capital expenditures. So where's the value creation?

Nelson Peltz's plan to bust up DuPont doesn't add up
(Fortune)
Again, question of value creation.



For Internet of Things, Chaos Reigns (Clutter, Too) (Zatz Not Funny!)

Links 1/9/2015: SAP adding Hadoop talent base for HANA; Cisco seen making up ground on Arris in cable cloud tech

Nelson Peltz takes aim at DuPont board seats as breakup battle continues (Fortune)

Data storage company Box expected to be valued at up to $1.55 billion (Reuters)

Oracle names Thomas Kurian president (Gigaom)

SAP Hauling in Talent for ‘Hadoop on HANA’ (ASUG News)

MongoDB Is Raising Another $100 Million, Regulatory Filing Shows (TechCrunch)


Companies and themes to follow in 2015 part 1: ERP related overview (Brian Sommer/Diginomica)

What 2014 taught us about the shifting startup landscape (TechRepublic via Yahoo News)


Fire at Amazon Data Center Construction Site in Ashburn Contained (Data Center Knowledge)
AWS users can relax.

Cisco Systems Cloud Platform Catching On Cable TV (Investor's Business Daily)

Cable lobby says Google Fiber doesn’t need Title II to get pole access (Ars Technica)

Comcast Stops New ‘Energy Rewards’ Enrollments (Multichannel News)


Publicis Touchpoint Solutions Partners with Cegedim Relationship Management for Next-Generation CRM, CLM, and Remote Detailing Solution (Business Wire)

Links 1/8/2015: D & B acquires Edison Partners-backed NetProspex for $125 million; Jet.com readies launch

Amazon Bought This Man's Company. Now He's Coming for Them (Business Week)
Marc Lore's Jet.com is close to launch.

Say What? Texas Instruments to power Comcast voice recognition remote controls (Dallas Business Journal)

Google, Amazon Get Query From U.S. on Comcast’s Cable Merger (Bloomberg)


CRF Health Announces Investment by Vitruvian Partners to Support Growth (PR Newswire)
CRF Health's North American headquarters are located in Plymouth Meeting.

Dun & Bradstreet Acquires NetProspex to Deliver Largest Global Reach and Insight on Companies and the People Who Run Them (Marketwire)
Edison Partners has been the leading investor in Massachusetts-based NetProspex.


Fingerpaint moves Philadelphia office into larger space (Albany Business Review)

LG Electronics Partners with Dow to Commercialize LGs New Ultra HD TV with Quantum Dot Technology
(Business Wire)

Setting the tone for 2015: CRM begat Social CRM which begat customer engagement (Paul Greenberg/Enterprise Irregulars)

Oracle Challenges Spark Caution; Estimates Lowered (Investor's Business
Daily)

Does Dish's Sling TV offer better value than cable? Comcast says not really

Tom Paine

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Think OTT (Over the top) offerings such as Dish's newly announced Sling TV will offer better value? Well, Comcast Cable CEO Neil Smit tried to rebut that notion while speaking at the Citi 2015 Global Internet, Media & Telecommunications Conference in Las Vegas this week, as quoted by the Hollywood Reporter:

"Reading about Sling TV, I was comparing it to what an equivalent offer would be for us," he said. "We offer a performance-based broadband product along with a digital television selection, which includes ESPN and all the broadcast networks, for a ... price of about $80. If you were to compare that to the $20 of the Dish [over-the-top service] plus our ... pricing of performance broadband at about $67, we are actually a lower-priced offer all-in, offering broadcast, multiple streams, a fundamentally, I think, better product if you include the broadband you are going to need to [get] the service."

So in other words, there is no free lunch and no better alternative to your local cable company?

Smit did say that pay TV and video providers will engage in "more experimentation" to target younger people and the financially conscious, citing Comcast's own "Internet Plus" service that launched in 2013.

But MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett said that "this product (Sling TV) will find a niche and that its pricing will be genuinely disruptive", though he doesn't expect it to take the world by storm.