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<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Michael Seto/Business Insider</span></p><p class="caption">Zeta co-founder and former Apple CEO John Sculley.</p></div><p></p></div></div>Zeta Interactive, the big data and analytics company co-founded by former Apple CEO John Sculley, announced Wednesday it has raised a $125 million investment funding round.</p><p>Business Insider understands this now values Zeta Interactive at ~$1 billion, although the company would not confirm its valuation when asked.</p><p>Zeta competes with the likes of Oracle, Salesforce, IBM, and Adobe. It lets companies input their customer data into its marketing cloud, which uses machine learning to figure out the attributes of their audiences (such as age, income, location, and interests,) and also segments their best customers based on its own proprietary. Zeta then analyzes that data to send out targeted marketing messages via email, and help marketers create wider marketing plans.</p><p>Where Zeta differs from its competitors is that it focuses on using this data for customer acquisition - targeting potential new customers who have opted in to marketing messages - whereas its marketing cloud rivals largely focus on the retention of existing customers.</p><p>Speaking to Business Insider, Zeta Interactive CEO and co-founder David A. Steinberg, said the company has grown 72% year on year, and that it is on track to generate $200 million in revenue by the end of 2015. He said Zeta has been both gross and net profitable for "three years in a row."</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Zeta Interactive</span></p><p class="caption">Zeta Interactive CEO David A. Steinberg.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>Steinberg said Zeta plans to use its funding to invest further in its platform and to acquire technology that will accelerate growth, and that it is particularly focusing on companies in the machine learning, analytics, and email service provider space.</p><p>In a statement, Sculley, who was also the former CEO of Pepsi, said: "This investment will help us attract and retain world-class talent, enhance our award-winning technology platform and sharpen our offerings for our Fortune 500 and middle-market clients. This funding is a testament to the great job David and his team have done to date, as well as an indication that even bigger things are still to come."</p><p>Zeta's latest financing round was led by Blackstone and GSO Capital Partners.</p><p>It last raised funding back in 2012 - when the company was called XL Marketing - <a href="http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/xl-marketing-announces-70-million-funding-for-growth-capital-157787295.html">a $70 million round led by GCP Capital Partners.</a></p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/biggest-changes-coming-ipad-ios-9-multitask-new-apple-2015-7">The 2 best features coming to the iPad</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="dxYzc1djoXDxpNw53fCtBBZv5ICoIKtG" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

The former CEO of Apple just raised a big funding round at a ~$1 billion valuation for his new company

Mumbai, Jan 22 () Serial entrepreneur Bhavin Turakhia on Wednesday said he is focusing on taking his newest business Zeta to the US and Europe as he looks to decrease the fintech firm's reliance on India for revenues.
<p> The 40-year-old billionaire said the company is not looking at any acquisitions or stake sales at present, but will be open for a strategic investor coming in like French player Sodexo.
</p><p> Turakhia said over USD 70 million has been invested in the company, including USD 40 million by him and co-founders and USD 30 million by Sodexo, for creating a product suite targeted at banks.
</p><p> "We have been building the product for four years and 
will be launching in US, which is the biggest market for fintechs, and European countries this year," Turakhia told .
</p><p> He said all his previous businesses, including Directi, have depended on overseas clients for revenues, but Zeta has been an exception, wherein it sold services to Indian banks initially, and then branched out to Brazil, the Philippines and Vietnam in its four-year journey till now.
</p><p> The UK, Italy and Spain are the markets in Europe the company is looking at, Turakhia said, adding it takes up to six months for customising a product to local compliance requirements and ensuring connectivity with local financial switches.
</p><p> The company launched the suite called 'Tachyon' on Wednesday, wherein it has integrated a host of applications and services into a single suite. 
</p><p> The company is looking at increasing its total headcount to 650 by end of March 2021, and half of the incremental talent will be hired overseas across functions, Turakhia said.
</p><p> It will continue to look at India as a key for its engineering and product development activities, but will also hire talent for this function overseas, he said.
</p><p> At present, it counts on Kotak Mahindra Bank, RBL Bank, IDFC Bank, ICICI Bank and HDFC Bank as among clients, Turakhia said, adding that it has also developed core banking softwares for which it is in a few conversations.
</p><p> Typically, a new age bank or one which is entering into a new vertical like credit cards is the one which will be looking for the core banking solution, he said, adding the company sees the ongoing mergers of state-run banks as an opportunity.
</p> Turakhia said the company will be "self sufficient" from a cash flow perspective and added that it does not require any external capital. It has last raised capital at a USD 300 million valuation.  AA  MR
MR

Bhavin Turakhia looks to take fintech product to US, Europe

<p><em>Hello, and welcome to this week's edition of the Insider Tech <keyword id="621414" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="Newsletter">newsletter</keyword>, where we break down the biggest news in tech, including:</em></p><ul><li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/why-miami-mayor-is-worried-about-tech-vc-startup-scene">Miami techies bristle at Silicon Valley "saviors"</a></li><li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/kellie-gerardi-palantir-employee-tiktok-virgin-galactic-astronaut-2021-6?r=rr">Palantir's TikTok astro-mom</a></li><li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/vcs-name-most-promising-startups-of-2021-6">The most promising startups of 2021</a></li></ul><h4><a href="http://newsletter.businessinsider.com/join/4np/insider-tech">Did someone forward this newsletter to you? Sign up here.</a></h4><p><em><strong>Soundtrack:</strong> This week's newsletter has been specially designed to be consumed <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRcPA7Fzebw">while listening to David Bowie's "Starman."</a></em></p><h3>This week: Tech egos are clashing, from the shores of Miami to the depths of space</h3><p>For more than a year, Silicon Valley techies have abandoned their homeland and poured into Miami in search of startup El Dorado. As Candy Cheng reports, the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/why-miami-mayor-is-worried-about-tech-vc-startup-scene">influx of newcomers is causing friction with the locals. </a></p><ul><li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-miamis-hot-new-tech-scene-2021-6"><strong>A Founders Fund VC who moved to Miami</strong> in April declared the start of the inaugural "Miami Tech Week,"</a> never thinking that there already was a Miami Tech Week.</li><li><strong><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/why-miami-mayor-is-worried-about-tech-vc-startup-scene">"These folks are saying they 'discovered' Miami, which to us is frustrating,"</a> </strong>said Brian Breslin, a longtime figure in the city's tech scene, comparing the newcomers' attitudes to "Columbus coming and claiming he discovered America."</li><li>If you're in Miami, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/miami-vc-startup-founders-meeting-places-restaurants-carbone-kyu-2021-5">here are some of the hotspots where newcomers and longtime locals network and make deals.</a></li></ul><p><strong>If not Miami, then space. </strong>There's another group of brash Silicon Valley adventurers setting off for new horizons, and lucky for them, where they're going there are no locals to clash with (we think). </p><ul><li><strong><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-first-human-flight-mark-bezos-2021-6">Amazon founder Jeff Bezos</a></strong> announced that he and <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/who-is-mark-bezos-jeff-bezos-brother-space-flight-2021-6">his brother Mark</a> will be on-board the first rocket from his <keyword id="199288" type="COMPANY" weightage="60" keywordseo="Blue-Origin">Blue Origin</keyword> company to blast into space, on July 20.</li><li><strong>Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket</strong> is <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-spaceflight-unlike-any-prior-rocket-launch-2021-6">completely automated and will provide passengers three minutes of weightless bliss in space</a> before returning to Earth.</li><li><strong>There's one seat left on Bezos' spaceship</strong>, and the auction to buy the ticket closes on Saturday (<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/blue-origin-auction-highest-bid-jeff-bezos-space-flight-2021-5">as of Thursday, the bidding had reached $4 million</a>). You may recall that <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-donald-trump-space-amazon-2015-12">Bezos once promised to reserve a seat on his rocket to send Donald Trump into space</a> - could there be a surprise bid from Mar-a-Lago? </li></ul><p>Meanwhile, rival space entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson may try to beat Bezos to orbit <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/rumor-suggests-richard-branson-racing-to-launch-before-jeff-bezos-2021-6">by blasting off in a Virgin Galactic spaceship on July 4.</a></p><p>Elon Musk, the other space race billionaire, has yet to announce plans for his own imminent trip. But chatter has centered on a prediction<strong> <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-science-fiction-nasa-colonize-colony-planets-solar-system-2021-6">from a 1953 book that describes a leader called "Elon" leading humans to Mars</a>- seriously.</strong></p><p>And a former Blue Origin employee <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/relativity-space-3d-printing-startup-raises-650m-from-fidelity-2021-6">has just raised $650 million to build 3D-printed rockets</a>. </p><p><strong>Even Palantir, the data analysis company, has a spacebound employee</strong>. <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/kellie-gerardi-palantir-employee-tiktok-virgin-galactic-astronaut-2021-6">Kelli Gerardi 32-year old Tik Tok star and logistics expert at Palantir</a>, will be aboard a separate <keyword id="130495" type="COMPANY" weightage="60" keywordseo="Virgin-galactic">Virgin Galactic</keyword> flight expected to launch in 2022.</p><p>"Less than a thousand humans have ever been to space - fewer than 100 women, only a handful of moms - and my 3-year-old is going to watch her mommy become one of them," <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/kellie-gerardi-palantir-employee-tiktok-virgin-galactic-astronaut-2021-6">Gerardi told Insider. </a></p><h3><keyword id="6362513" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="startups">Startups</keyword> to watch</h3><p><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/vcs-name-most-promising-startups-of-2021-6"><div type="image" title="Li Jin, Hans Tung, Gabby Cazeau, and Mike Duboe on a purple background." height="1250" width="1668" msid="83461797" hostid="261"></div></a></p><p>Insider asked dozens of top VCs to name the most promising Startups of 2021. They were asked to nominate startups they had invested in as well as ones where they had no financial ties. And they delivered an exciting list of companies, across all stages from newly launched to unicorns, each thriving for different reasons.</p><p>In our first on a series of stories of the Most Promising Startups of 2021, we present a list of 46, many of whom were named by multiple VCs as being companies to watch this year.</p><h3>Read the full story:</h3><h3><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/vcs-name-most-promising-startups-of-2021-6">46 of the most promising startups of 2021, according to top VCs</a></h3><h3>Snaphot: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/hands-on-polaroid-go-tiny-instant-camera-summer-2021-5">Polaroid's life lesson</a></h3><p>Yesterday's innovative breakthrough is today's retro tchotchke, and the miniaturized version of Polaroid's classic instant camera is a fun, and instructive, reminder of the olden times.</p><p><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/hands-on-polaroid-go-tiny-instant-camera-summer-2021-5">The tiny plastic Polaroid Go spits out photos that gradually, over a period of 10 to 15 minutes, develop all by themselves.</a> Once upon a time, that was a big deal - it meant you didn't have to take your film to be developed at a shop and then wait a couple of days to get prints of your photos.</p><p><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/hands-on-polaroid-go-tiny-instant-camera-summer-2021-5"><div type="image" title="The Polaroid Go" height="2274" width="3024" msid="83461798" hostid="261"></div></a></p><p>For today's digital generation, there's nothing special about being able to view pictures right away, of course. </p><p>But perhaps the Polaroid has something better than mere nostalgia to offer Gen Z.</p><p>Scarcity is an increasingly foreign concept to those living in a time of <a href="https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/inflation-increase-outlook-us-money-supply-explodes-jeremy-siegel-2021-5-1030432547">super-low interest rates</a>, bottomless social media feeds, on-demand streaming movies, and smartphone cameras that take infinite selfies. With a film camera - even a toy-like instant camera - you only get a finite number of pictures. Each shot needs to count. Imagine that.</p><h3>Recommended readings:</h3><p><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/poppy-seed-health-launches-app-raises-seed-funding-alexis-ohanian-2021-6">'I was pregnant and then I wasn't.' How a miscarriage led a startup employee to build a company that's now funded by Alexis Ohanian's Seven Seven Six.</a></p><p><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/vmware-execs-cybersecurity-strategy-carbon-black-2021-6">VMware is in an all-out sprint to grow its $1 billion security business, doubling its engineering staff to compete with cyber giants like Microsoft and Cisco</a></p><p><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/travis-kalanick-cloudkitchens-americas-manager-leaves-to-healthtech-startup-2021-6">Travis Kalanick's CloudKitchens loses second exec in a month</a></p><p><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/pitch-deck-zeta-banking-250-million-1-45bn-valuation-from-softbank-2021-6">This pitch deck persuaded Softbank to make its first banking tech investment, sending Zeta's valuation rocking to $1.45 billion</a></p><p><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/ibm-salaries-engineers-business-analysts-digital-strategists-2021-6">IBM salaries revealed: How much the $132 billion tech giant paid software engineers, business analysts, and more in 2021</a></p><p><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/magic-leap-executives-depart-in-leadership-shake-up-peggy-johnson-2021-6">Top executives at Magic Leap are leaving the company in the biggest leadership shakeup under CEO Peggy Johnson</a></p><h3>Not necessarily in tech:</h3><p><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/subway-founder-ceo-fred-deluca-inside-story-2021-6">Subway cofounder Fred DeLuca ruled the company like a demigod and pursued wives of franchisees. How one man sent the world's biggest fast-food chain into a tailspin.</a></p><p>Thanks for reading, and if you like this newsletter,<strong> <a href="http://newsletter.businessinsider.com/join/4np/insider-tech">tell your friends and colleagues they can sign up here to receive it</a>.</strong></p><p>- Alexei</p>

Miami and Space - the new battlegrounds for tech's top egos

<p class="source"><span>Zeta Global</span></p><p class="caption">Zeta Global founder CEO David Steinberg</p>On Thursday, Zeta Global, a company co-founded by David Steinberg and former Apple CEO John Sculley announced a$140 million round of financing - $115 million in equity capital and $25 million in debt financing. The nearly 10-year-old startup has now raised more than $250 million in total.<p>While the company wouldn't comment on the valuation, a source tells us it rings in at $1.3 billion, up from over $1 billion in 2012, the last time the company raised equity capital. Zeta Global offers cloud sales and marketing software.</p><p>This funding is a moment of triumph for founder CEO David Steinberg, he jubilantly told us on the phone.</p><p>"We were looking to raise maybe a $50 million to $75 million round, really trying to accomplish bringing in enough money to do another acquisition. But every group we met with were saying 'We don't do deals that small anymore,'" he said.</p><p>Given that no one would invest $75 million or less, the team went back to the drawing board with its bankers, upped their ask to $100 million and the term sheets started pouring in, Steinberg said.</p><p>"We started off looking for a smaller amount of money and got rejected. Then we raised the amount and got oversubscribed," he laughed. His analysis: funds today are overflowing with money and partners don't want to spread themselves too thin with smaller deals and too many portfolio companies.</p><p>But there was an even sweeter win to all this. Steinberg, Sculley and the top management team didn't have to give up that much of their company in equity. They still own more than half of it, Steinberg says.</p><p>Turns out, they had an old-fashioned secret weapon: profits. "We are already profitable and have been cash-flow positive for three years," Steinberg said. In 2016, the company <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2016/11/18/zeta-global-new-name-behind-300-million-in-revenue/#828ea6928636">was said to have brought in $300 million in revenue</a>, up from $200 million the year before. And it's been growing "by about 50% a year," he said.</p><p>That cash flow has helped the company largely finance its needs through debt over the years.</p><p>Things could have turned out very differently. Unlike a typical Silicon Valley startup however, Steinberg and his partners didn't listen to the VCs back in the day when the company hit a trouble spot and was looking for investors.</p><h2>Silicon Valley math</h2><p>The catalyst for Zeta came during a dark phase in the company's history.</p><p>Steinberg was lying awake in bed one night. The company he and Sculley had bootstrapped to about $60 million of profitable revenue was in trouble.</p><p>It was a big-data cloud-software platform that specialized in helping the for-profit education industry find customers. Things had gone well, but many such schools had gained a sleazy reputation for charging a lot, putting students in big debt and underdelivering on the promised new careers. The government was cutting off funding for schools when their job placement stats didn't meet muster. And <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/barack-obama-pushes-for-profit-colleges-to-the-brink-119613">the once thriving sector was withering.</a></p><p>"If we don't pivot, we're going ot die,"Steinberg thought to himself that night.</p><p>He decided to twist his startup into a marketing cloud that was broad enough for any company to find new customers, beyond those focused on education. He knew he needed to make some acquisitions to acquire the tech and customers for a quick turnaround.</p><p>And to do that, he was going to need funding.He and Sculley had invested the first $15 million or so themselves and Zeta was cash-flow profitable even in its early years.</p><p>They did the rounds on Sand Hill and "nobody liked us,"Steinberg recalled. They were perturbed that the company was managing its growth to stay at around 50% to keep its costs in check and its profit margins healthy.</p><p>One "top tier VC" told them,"The fact that you've built this business to profitability doesn't interest us. We care about market share and growing as fast as possible,"Steinberg remembers. He advised them to take all their cash, put themselves into the red, hire a bunch of sales people and grow revenue as fast as they could.</p><p>Many Valley VCs still think that way. Very few VC-backed companies are profitable when they start selling their shares in the public market. Many startups even radically boost their sales and marketing spend before their IPOs to show investors they are still in hot-growth mode.</p><p>Although venture capital investors might object to the characterization, a common knock against VCs is that their primary goal isn't to build a sustainable long-term company, but to grow the company's value through revenue and market share - at least until the VC can sell its stake at a profit via an acquisition or an IPO.</p><p>"You could argue that [the motivation] is even worse than that. They are not only looking for a quick exit, but also to deploy as much capital as they have, and keep you needing money, so they can keep pumping money in and taking over a bigger percentage of the company," Steinberg says of VCs.</p><p>That kind of Silicon Valley math <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/why-founders-give-up-90-of-the-company-2014-5">definitely works for many</a> founders. But Zeta was founded in New York - although it now has offices globally - and prefers the New York attitude that profits do matter.</p><p>In the end, they found a VC that appreciated their old-fashioned, profit-loving style of leadership, Bob <a></a>Niehaus of New York's GCP Capital. "He gave us $20 million and helped us raise another $50 million in debt and helped us buy our first software assets,"Steinberg says.</p><p>With healthy cash flow coming in, the company continued to prefer to borrow money rather than sell pieces of itself to finance things like acquisitions. By 2017, its value had grown vast enough to raise a lot of cash by selling a small piece of itself, while keeping its controlling stake in its founders' and executives' hands.</p><p>The $140 million round was led by GPI Capital and GPI's Bill Royan will join Zeta's board.</p>            <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/why-some-people-turn-red-drink-alcohol-2017-4">The disturbing reason some people turn red when they drink alcohol</a></h3>                                    Please enable Javascript to watch this video

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The former CEO of Apple just raised a big funding round at a ~$1 billion valuation for his new company

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Bhavin Turakhia looks to take fintech product to US, Europe

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Miami and Space - the new battlegrounds for tech's top egos

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The founders of a $1.3 billion startup raised $250 million while keeping over 50% of the company for themselves

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