September SMB News Round-up

Here’s a look at the SMB tech companies making news this past month.

Lending Club: Black Sheep or Golden Goose?

Lending Club was the top gainer in the SurePath SMB Index in September, up 14.2% MoM. While it’s still far away from its glory days of trading at over $25, the market has rewarded its efforts at trying to turn the ship back around. In September, Lending Club made a couple of notable hires — Thomas Casey as CFO (most recently CFO at Acelity) as well as Russell S. Elmer as General Counsel (formerly PayPal).

Unfortunately, Lending Club is still having a hard time convincing investors to trust the company with their money. In Q2, investment capital was reduced across the board by all funding sources. Lending Club is not out of the woods yet. It may have stopped the hemorrhaging, but it still has yet to determine a path back to its previous position.

MindBody Acquires HealCode

On September 6, MindBody announced its acquisition of HealCode — a developer of widgets for MindBody. Founded in 2008, HealCode has several customer engagement tools that sit on top of users’ websites and social media channels. HealCode has over 7,500 subscribers. The acquisition allows MindBody to give their subscribers a full suite of digital tools. The terms of the deal was not disclosed. This is the company’s fourth acquisition.

MindBody was the second biggest gainer in this month on SurePath SMB Index — up 13.3% MoM. Unlike Lending Club’s gain that was resulting from hitting rock bottom and climbing up again, MindBody’s gains are based on several positive analyst reports as well as a major shareholder acquiring $3.2M USD worth of shares towards end of the month.

Shopify Making Waves in September

Shopify had an extremely busy September — launching its VR App (Thread Studio), announced a partnership with Canada Post, piloting an experiential learning program with Carleton University, and BONUS — acquired Boltmade (which we will explore in detail in the October update).

Thread Studio is really an early foray into Shopify’s grand vision of virtual reality assisted shopping. In a Reddit thread from six months ago, Daniel Beauchamp, Head of VR at Shopify, sharied his vision of VR as taking the product you are looking to buy to where you would be using it. While Thread Studio is cool — we’re quite confident that it’s just the tip of the VR iceberg.

GoDaddy Acquires ManageWP

GoDaddy announced that it acquired ManageWP on September 6th. ManageWP — a WordPress management tool which allows users to manage multiple websites from a single dashboard — grants GoDaddy the ability to provide better publishing tools for bloggers and WordPress based websites. 8% of websites on ManageWP are already hosted on GoDaddy — demonstrating an opportunity for GoDaddy to entice other customers to switch over. The company is also aiming to provide some of the premium ManageWP features for free to attract more WordPress users.

ShoreTel — To Buy or Not To Buy

Last month, we reported ShoreTel’s formation of a Strategic Advisory Committee. This month, various sources “predicted” that Mitel and ShoreTel will likely resume M&A negotiations (Mitel made an offer for ShoreTel in 2014 for $574M). However, that rumor was quickly snubbed by Mitel with a spokesperson saying that a ShoreTel acquisition does not make financial sense. While consolidation continues to happen in the unified communications industry, the fate of ShoreTel (and its future home) is yet to be determined.

Xero

While Lending Club continues to try to regain its footing, Xero is now entering the mix with partnerships to enter the small business lending sector. CEO Rod Drury noted at Xerocon that due to Xero’s wealth of data on small businesses, banks can leverage that information to reduce the risk of lending to small businesses.

Yelp

Yelp continues to shift away from its focus on reviews to leverage its massive array of local data and content. Yelp launched a developer program called Yelp Fusion this month to grant developers access to broader content and search tools. This will allow apps featuring geolocation recommendations to build more detailed features. One such app already looking to adopt this capability is Coffee Meets Bagel — a dating app looking to provide tools to pick the perfect first date spot using information such as noise levels, price, rating and more.

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