Technology

ZenProspect, a startup that emerged from the Y Combinator Winter 2016 class to help companies use data and intelligence to increase sales, announced today that it was rebranding as Apollo. It also announced a $7 million Series A investment.

The round was led by Nexus Venture Partners. Social Capital and Y Combinator also participated. Apparently Y Combinator liked what they saw enough to continue to invest in the company.

Apollo helps customers connect their sales people with the right person at the right time. That is typically a customer that is most likely to buy the product.It does this by combining a number of tools including a rules engine to automate prospect routing, a lead scoring tool and analytics to measure results at a granular level, among others.

The company also uses data they have collected from 200 million contacts at 10 million companies to match sellers to buyers along with the information in the userown CRM tools — typically Salesforce. Apollo is making this vast database of company and contact data available for customers to use themselves for free starting today.

Apollo CEO and founder Tim Zheng says the company was born out of a need at a previous venture. He was workingat a startup that was floundering and sales had flatlined. When they couldn&t find a product on the market to help them, they decided to build it and saw the number of users increase from 5000 to 150,000 users in just five weeks. That eventually reached a million users. As he spoke to friends at other Bay area companies about what his company had done, he heard a lot of interest, and decided to turn that sales tool into a company.

The company launched as ZenProspect in 2015 and went through Y Combinator in 2016. They were the third fastest growing company in that YC batch, generating $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) during their tenure.In fact, they were profitable out of the gate, using their own software to sell the product.

Zheng points out that there are thousands of sales tools out there, but he said, even if you bought every one of them and stitched them together you still wouldn&t have a great sales process. Zheng says his company has figured out how to solve that problem and provide that structure to deliver the best prospects to sales people to close deals.

The company works closely with Salesforce as 80 percent of its customers are using data inside of Salesforce in conjunction with the Apollo tool. Itworth noting, however, that Apollo is not built on top of Salesforce platform. It just integrates with it.

They target both early stage startups looking to increase sales and established enterprise customers with huge sales teams. So far itbeen working. Today, Apollo has 500 customers and 50 employees. With the current influx of money, they expect to get to 120 in the next 12 -18 months.

Therea rare moment of cheer for floundering electric car maker Faraday Future after it landed a new investor and a fresh commitment of capital.

Evergrande Health, a division of Hong Kong-listed Evergrande, has taken a 45 percent stake inFaraday Future in a deal worth a total of $2 billion.Evergrande Health has taken over an investment commitment agreed to last November bySeason Smart Limited, an investor that swooped in to save Faraday Future when its cash was on the verge of running out.

Season Smart invested an initial tranche of $800 million, according to filings, but nowEvergrande Health has taken that over for around $860 million, or HK$6.75 billion. Beyond that money, Evergrande Health has a commitment to complete the overall deal by investing$600 million by the end 2019, and a further $600 million by the end of 2020.

Aside fromEvergrande Health45 percent share, existing investors own a combined33 percent with the remaining 22 percent allocated to Faraday Future1,000 employees as part of an incentive program. On the subject of staff, founder Yueting Jia (known as JT) will become Faraday Futureglobal CEO with immediate effect.

It was widely reported that he was keen to keep majority ownership and remain in charge, but it looks like hehad to settle for the latter only with this deal — but hey that beats being in the deadpool.

Faraday Future, which is technically a U.S. firm but is heavily backed by Chinese money,said the deal was approved by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) after the initial agreement from investors in November.

&FF will continue to use the committed funds to accomplish our top priority — finalizing the development and delivering the first production vehicle, FF 91 to both US and China markets,& the company said in a statement.

&The investment will also support Faraday Future to expand its product pipeline, develop cutting-edge technologies and grow the business rapidly in the global marketplace, including our manufacturing facilities in Hanford, California and in Guangzhou Nansha, Guangdong Province, China,& it added.

The FF 91 shown off at CES 2017

The deal is a rare boost forFaraday Future which was founded in 2014 as a rival to Tesla but has struggled to deliver on its hype and promise.

The company unveiled its vision for electric cars — the FF 91 — at a glitzy launch event in CES last year, but 2017 was a year to forget.

Following on from reports of financial issues with parent company LeEco in late 2016, Faraday Future paused construction of its new factoryand then scaled back its product line due to financial concerns. The company was sued by a visual effects team it didn&t payand then, when the cash crunch really hit home, it canceled plans for an assembly plant in California and went back on a $1 billion project to developa massive factory in the Nevada desert.

After abandoning plans for a tailor-made factory, it later inked a deal on a more general facility in Hanford, California.

The drama hasn&t ended for YT, who first founded LeEco,however . Hebeen under pressure in his native China over debts that have piled up — to the sum of $890 million — for his Leshi Internet video streaming division. Tencent and JD.com, two large Chinese internet firms, invested in LeEcosmart TV unit earlier this year, while the parent firm was previously bailed out by property company Sunac in early 2017.

Apple this morning launched Schoolwork, a free app for teachers that was first introduced at Appleeducation event in Chicago back in March. The cloud-based app allows teachers using iPads in the classroom to create and distribute handouts and other assignments, collaborate individually with students, track students& progress, and & perhaps most notably & allows teachers to assign specific activities within educational apps.

That means instead of pointing students to download an app and then give them instructions on how to access the individual task, teachers can instead guide students directly to a specific lesson with an app.

This lets schools tap into the power of AppleApp Store ecosystem, which has benefitted from being a more curated, trusted experience, where many kids& app publishers launch their new and updated apps first and/or keep larger catalogs.

Select educational apps already work with Schoolwork, including Explain Everything, Tynker, GeoGebra, and Kahoot!.

With this ability to assign in-app tasks, teachers can see how well the student is doing with the given assignment, not just their usage of the app overall. And they can also see how well the whole classroom is doing from their own dashboard, too.

Apple additionally emphasized the privacy elements to Schoolwork when it was first announced, and it reiterates them today.

Schools get to &create, own and control& the accounts used by students, says the company, and they get to determine when student progress information is shared.

Apple cannot see the student activity, either, as it stays within the system.

Privacy is a key selling point these days for Apple products. It could spur more adoption of its hardware and software devices in the classroom, even though its new $299 iPads for schools are higher priced than some of the low-end Chromebook options from Google that can range $100 to $150, for example.

The newiPads, along with software for digital book creation, Classroom for Mac, an updated Swift Playgrounds app, and other educational tools were also shown off at the Chicago event earlier this year.

Schoolwork is designed to work with the Classroom app, which now runs on both iPad and Mac.

The Classroom app lets teachers view students& screen in class, share documents with students, assign shared iPads, and reset student passwords. Students, meanwhile, use Schoolwork to view the content teachers& share & like announcements, handouts, documents, PDFs, and web links & and track which of their assignments are due.

Appleefforts in education come at a time when Google is winning the market with its Chromebooks, which have a reported nearly 60 percent share in the classroom, according to estimates.

But Appledevices may appeal for other activities beyond word processing and web research & its iPads for the classroom, for example, support Apple Pencil, including within iWork, as well as Logitech$49 &crayon.& Teachers can create lightweight iPad-based texts using iPad Author, and kids can learn to create AR apps in Swift Playgrounds.

Teachers can learn more about Appleeducational tools on its dedicated site here.