![]() Forter, a New York City-based e-commerce fraud prevention company, raised $300 million in Series F funding. SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led the round and was joined by investors including Eurazeo, Bpifrance, KKR, Canaan, Highland Europe, and BlackRock. Contentsquare, a Paris-based digital experience analytics company, raised $500 million in Series E funding. Softbank Vision Fund 2 led the round and was joined by investors including Spark Capital and Victory Park Capital. Perch, a Boston-based acquirer of Amazon third-party brands, raised $775 million in Series A funding. Join C3 AI President and Chief Technology Officer Edward Abbo, ServiceNow CIO Chris Bedi, and Lightspeed Partner Anoushka Vaswani for a Fortune Brainstorm Tech discussion on June 3 at 1 p.m. But it also has its skeptics, if UiPath’s bumpy post-IPO ride is any indication. Lucinda Shen Twitter: The no-code and low-code movement is a potentially enormous market. ![]() The most recent company to get funding? Snappy, which raised $70 million from investors led by GGV Capital. GIFTING-AS-A-SERVICE: It may seem esoteric, but investors in venture capital are betting that corporate gifting is enough of a headache for companies that they will pay other companies to deal with the logistics. This is a kind of pipeline for them to get to talent, to get opportunities to acquire companies and to invest in companies.” They are looking for funds that can give them the same level of venture returns as any other fund they would put capital into. ![]() “This is not a charity for them,” says Barry Givens, General Capital at Collab Capital, which raised $52 million from investors including PayPal Tuesday. By investing in funds that largely invest in seed businesses, PayPal is creating a pipeline of companies that it could potentially invest in or perhaps even acquire. PayPal’s venture arm largely invests beyond Series A rounds. “And I think that can only be beneficial for PayPal and those entrepreneurs we’re investing in, because it makes it more likely that PayPal’s venture arm can invest in a later round of these entrepreneurs.” “We’re clearly opening our own aperture,” says Schulman, when asked whether PayPal was seeking to reach new audiences with the investments. But hopefully, when they make it, they think about getting back into their communities-a little like when the PayPal founders reinvested. “One of the glaring gaps is the amount of venture funding that goes to Black, Latinx and underrepresented communities. ![]() “If you think about generational wealth creation, that comes through entrepreneurship and venture capital,” Schulman told Term Sheet. In total, PayPal has now invested $100 million in Black- and Latinx-led venture capital firms. PayPal subsequently pledged $535 million to support Black and minority-owned businesses and communities, later carving out $50 million specifically for eight Black- and Latinx-led funds. Almost exactly a year ago, the death of George Floyd, a Black man, at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer jumpstarted questions around race in corporate America. Named to Fortune’s World’s Greatest Leaders list this year in part for his efforts in this arena, PayPal CEO Dan Schulman has long spoken out on closing the racial wealth gap. While PayPal did not say exactly how much each fund had received, it chose 11 funds that each have at least one managing partner from the Black and Latinx community and a track record of investing in founders with minority backgrounds: Aperture Venture Capital, Collab Capital, Interlace Ventures, Kapor Capital, MaC Venture Capital, Noemis Ventures, Seae Ventures, SV LATAM Capital, and three additional funds that PayPal did not identify. This morning, PayPal is announcing that it has invested another $50 million in Black and Latinx-led venture capital funds, doubling a commitment that it initiated last year.
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