– Soccer Manager from Preston, UK, raised £3m in funding.
– The round was led by its existing investor Mercia’s own funds, the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund and the Government’s Future Fund.
– The company intends to use the funds to grow its user base in the Middle East and Far East through local language translations, further develop its SM 2022 game which is due to launch this autumn, and relaunch its original multi-player game, SM World, by creating new apps and adding new features.

– Lob, the leading direct mail platform, announced that it has raised $50m in Series C funding.
– Led by long-time investor Y Combinator Continuity, this new financing round brings Lob’s total capital raised to $80m.
– Over 8,500 customers, including Twitter, Expedia, Booking.com, Betterment, Clover Health, Root Insurance and ThredUp, are using Lob’s platform to automate direct mail workflows.
– One in two U.S. households have now received mail generated from Lob’s platform, and the company is on pace to triple the amount of mail it will send in a single year.
– To continue scaling its operations, Lob is expanding its print delivery network—already the largest in America.

– Creatio, a low-code process automation and customer relationship management (CRM) platform, has raised $68 million in a round of funding led by growth equity firm Volition Capital.
– The raise, which is the first external investment in Creatio’s eight-year history, comes during a boom period for low-code and no-code platforms, spanning everything from enterprise app building and marketing analytics to web development, game production, and process automation.
– The global low-code development market is pegged at roughly $10 billion today, a figure that’s projected to rise to $187 billion within a decade as businesses battle to hire and retain top technical talent.
– Low-code platforms promise to help businesses improve many of their internal development and operational processes by enabling less technically-able workers to lean on automated tools such as Creatio.

– Replit, a browser-based integrated development environment (IDE) built for cross-platform collaborative coding, has raised $20 million in a series A round of funding led by A.Capital Ventures.
– Replit, which counts users from big-name companies such as Google, Facebook, and Stripe, closed the funding round in early 2020 but for various business and pandemic-related reasons delayed the announcement until today.
– Replit said it has invested the capital in R&D, hiring, and platform feature launches, noting that its user base has surged by 122% to more than 6 million users while its employee base has doubled.
– Founded out of San Francisco in 2016, Replit touts itself as the “first fully online multiplayer computing environment,” one that enables anyone to begin coding with minimal preparation and no downloads.

– Sentry, the leader in application monitoring, has raised $60m in Series D funding.
– The round was led by its first capital investor, Accel, with participation from existing investor New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and new investor, BOND.
– Accel was the first investor in Sentry, leading its seed round in 2015 and it has increased its stake in every subsequent round.

– Copado, a developer operations (DevOps) platform built for Salesforce, has closed a $96 million series B round co-led by Insight Partners and Salesforce Ventures.
– This follows an initial $26 million series B investment Copado announced last summer.
– The Salesforce ecosystem could be at least 4 times larger than Salesforce itself, according to some estimates, as myriad third parties build sizable businesses off the back of the platform.
– In the past three weeks alone, we’ve seen OwnBackup raise $167.5 million at a $1.4 billion valuation to bring cloud data backups to Salesforce, while fledgling startup Scratchpad secured $13 million for a productivity workspace aimed at Salesforce-powered sales teams.

– Spectral, an Israeli startup that’s developing automated tools to help developer teams spot mistakes such as confidential data buried in code, has emerged from stealth today with $6.2 million in a seed round of funding co-led by Amiti and MizMaa.
– Recent data from IBM suggests that the average cost of a data breach globally is $3.9 million, a figure that rises to more than $8.6 million for U.S. companies. As businesses have had to double down on their digital efforts over the past year due to the pandemic, this could open the door to more costly coding mistakes as businesses rush to ship new code.

– OutSystems, the leading modern application platform, today announced a $150 million capital raise.
– The round, co-led by Abdiel Capital and Tiger Global, values OutSystems at $9.5 billion.
– The funding will be used to expand investments in its R&D and GTM strategy.
– OutSystems was founded to give every organization the power to innovate through software.
– Using the OutSystems platform, businesses of all sizes can develop, deploy and manage critical apps at speed—enabling them to respond to market opportunities and continuously deliver value through software-driven innovation.
– OutSystems makes this possible by combining extraordinarily fast, visual, model-driven development with a modern platform built around AI, cloud, DevOps, and security.

– GeneQuine is a Hamburg, Germany-based biotech company focused on the development of gene therapy for musculoskeletal disorders.
– The company raised a total of €9.05m in Series A and non-dilutive funding.
– The round was led by Pacira BioSciences, Inc. (Nasdaq: PCRX), with participation from High-Tech Gründerfonds, Noshaq SA, and Samum Vermögensverwaltungs GmbH.