Two years ago a company called Decisyon Inc. joined the Plug and Play community, where our Ventures Team presented them to dozens of our investment partners like NEA, Alloy Ventures, General Catalyst and Opus. Decisyon listened to the feedback from these meetings and went on to present at our Plug and Play EXPO. Today, the company has raised $15 million in funding to drive global expansion.

“Decisyon has an extraordinary set of assets, most notably breakthrough technology, great people and a strong customer base of well-known global brands,” said Tom Cowan, Decisyon president and chief executive officer. “This funding enables us to support the company with the resources to expand into the global software market.”

Decisyon, Inc., will use this round of funding to drive global expansion and strengthen its capabilities to serve its rapidly growing customer base. This includes $10 million of immediate proceeds to the company and a pre-negotiated second tranche of $5 million scheduled for 2013. The round was led by New York-based growth investor Axel Johnson Inc. and included other prominent private technology investors from the United States and the United Kingdom.

“Axel Johnson has a long history of investing behind exceptional management teams working to create deep, lasting value for customers and their businesses,” said Michael Milligan, president and CEO of Axel Johnson Inc.  “We are pleased to have the opportunity to participate in the rapid expansion of Decisyon’s business.”

Built upon a unique collaborative data integration and analytics platform, Decisyon’s applications integrate and analyze disparate sources of information dynamically across the enterprise — enabling teams to quickly engage with new insights, make informed decisions and initiate actions.

The technical future of the automotive industry, today is getting a leg up with the help of a new tech startup accelerator program from the Volkswagen Group of America Electronics Research Laboratory and Plug and Play Tech Center.

The Electronics Research Laboratory (ERL), which innovates for major auto brands like Volkswagen, Audi, Bentley, Bugatti and Lamborghini, will be looking for ten lucky startups to accelerate. Peter Oel, Executive Director, Volkswagen Group Electronics Research Laboratory said, “Innovation is an integral part of Volkswagen Group’s long term product strategy and we take every opportunity to engage the brightest minds in technology to help define the future direction of automobiles. Our partnership with Plug and Play Tech Center provides an extraordinary platform for the most talented entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and around the country to bring forth innovation that will help us develop the most intelligent, connected vehicles of the future.”

The aptly named Volkswagen ERL Technology Accelerator is now accepting applications from tech startups in a variety of fields, from social media and recommendation engines to display/data integration and visual computing. Chosen startups will participate in the three-month program located at Plug and Play Tech Center’s Sunnyvale headquarters. Participating companies will receive access to hundreds of investors, corporations, and mentors within the Plug and Play network, exposure at Plug and Play events, regular educational seminars, and office space. Click here to learn more and apply.

Your original idea has gone south, but you still have money in the bank. What’s a savvy startup to do? Pivot, of course. In fact, the ability to pivot successfully might just be the single greatest talent a company can have. However, there are always questions to consider:

• What’s the difference between a product pivot, a business model pivot, and a whole company pivot?
• When is a pivot justified, and when is it just a “mulligan,” to use Mike Maples’ term?
• Can a startup pivot too frequently, or too many times?
• How can you tell if you’re one of the Living Dead—a company that needs to pivot, but is afraid to?
• Pivoting is stressful—how do you ride it out without succumbing to panic?
• How do you hold on to your higher purpose through a pivot?

Join founders and startup gurus to get the answers to these questions and hear frank insider stories about successful (and unsuccessful) pivots. This event will be held at PARC—itself the product of a successful pivot back in 2002, when Xerox spun it off as a contract-research subsidiary. We look forward to seeing you there!

December 4, 2:00 – 5:00pm - PARC, George E. Pake Auditorium, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, CA 94304

Click Here to learn more and register!

Meet October’s Hottest Company of the Month: xAd! xAd is one of the largest mobile advertising networks in the U.S. with access to the largest supply of location based advertising inventory in the market. With over a million advertisers, xAd delivers mobile location at scale.

1. Don’t be afraid of failure. Learn from it and move on. - As Vlad Barshai, Co-Founder of Pinerly says, “The reality is, for first-timers, you’re more than bound to fail. So fail and get up and do it again, and again. Eventually you’ll learn and end up hitting the right market.”

2. Just do it. At some point, you have to put the books down and get started. - Alexander Debelov, CO-Founder and CEO of Virool says, “You can spend a lot of time fleshing out a business plan, reading a lot of books, making presentations – but what will actually make your business is your first customer.  Before you do anything, find your first customer. Try to sell them your idea. Even if they say no, it’s going to power you up.”

3. Be smart about hiring your team. - Roman Karachinsky, CEO and Co-Founder of News 306 advises, “Spend time thinking about strategy in terms of building the team, the culture, and don’t do it as-you-go. Have a plan. It may not work 100% but it will help.”

Plug and Play is gearing up for its first-ever cloud event, CloudScale, in partnership with CloudNOW. This is a behind-the-scenes preview of the 10 pitching companies. For more information on CloudScale and to register, click here.

CloudInsure is a Cloud Insurance platform designed to specifically address emerging liabilities within the Cloud environment. In partnership with global insurance and reinsurance carriers, we’ve engineered privacy & security liability coverage to meet the needs of the Cloud Computing space for enterprise customers. Through our innovative underwriting models and proprietary analytics, we bring insurance solutions that move at the pace of Cloud technology.

ComputeNext  – An “uber-aggregator” of cloud IaaS, ComputeNext has built the only transparent marketplace for cloud infrastructure procurement.

distil.it - Business Description: Distil is the first Content Protection Network that helps companies identify and block malicious content scraping and data theft. Distil makes real-time decisions and seamlessly distinguishes human visitors from malicious bots while improving page load times and reducing server load.

Oris4 allows you to find any corporate information, from anywhere without searching. Our software serves up anything in your enterprise, including email and across your cloud services like Salesforce, Box, Dropbox and Gmail. All of the information is organized for you and delivered to you in the context of what your are working on and who you are working with.

Strategic Blue Cited by Gartner as the only true cloud broker dealer, Strategic Blue brings the pricing and risk management strategies of the financial commodities markets to cloud computing via revenue-generating services that add convenience and value to the cloud user. Strategic Blue steps into the billing chain between you as a cloud user, and your cloud providers, so that you can pay for your cloud usage under an arrangement tailored to suit you: ”Strategic Blue buys from cloud providers how they want to sell, and sells to cloud users how they want to buy.

Zadara Storage Winner of Venturebeat’s and Under the Radar cloud competitions, Zadara Storage offers Enterprise-class storage for the cloud. With Zadara Storage, cloud storage leapfrogs ahead to provide cloud servers with high-performance, fully configurable, highly available, fully private, tiered storage. By combining the best of Enterprise storage with the best of cloud storage, Zadara Storage takes the cloud to the next level enabling Enterprises to migrate mission-critical applications to the Cloud. Discover the benefits of cloud without the compromise: zadarastorage.com

Corent Tech Corent is emerging as the “Intel Inside”® for the exploding SaaS market. Its “plug- in” SaaS-enabling software rapidly transforms conventional on-premise single- tenant software applications into elastic, scalable, on-demand, multi-tenant cloud- ready SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions without re-writing the applications. The average savings are $3M of development costs and 3 years of go-to-market time. In other words: What VMware has done for hardware, Corent is now doing for Software.

TransLattice TransLattice is the geographically distributed database and application platform company that provides data where and when it is needed, for enterprise, cloud and hybrid environments. This new approach to enterprise and cloud infrastructure results in significantly reduced costs and deployment complexity, while dramatically improving system reliability, scalability and response time. TransLattice was founded in 2007, and officially launched in August 2010. For more information, please visitwww.translattice.com.

everbill With everbill startups and SMEs can easily create invoices, estimates, purchase orders, and alike documents via any connected device and exchange them with their customers and suppliers. everbill is a software-as-a-service application wherefore our users don’t have to install, update, or maintain local software. With already 600 paying customers in Austria and a conversion rate of 25% from test- to-purchase, everbill is a proven product to be scaled in other geographic markets.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer isn’t the only “lady with a baby” in the Silicon Valley these days. Startup Camp graduate and Bonica Co-Founder Julia Carolina pitched onstage, recently, at Plug and Play Tech Center’s Fall EXPO to over 500 people… while 7 months pregnant!

When most women would be considering maternity leave, Julia is moving at the speed of Silicon Valley. Today, Julia Carolina is at DEMO showcasing her startup Bonica, a shopping recommendation service for new parents, which she co-founded with her husband, Hans Teja.

Q. Julia, how would you describe your role at Bonica? I’m the Chief Mommy Officer – the mom behind the startup. I have a 17-month-old daughter and I am expecting my second child very soon.

Q. Where did the idea for Bonica come from? When I had my daughter, I had a lot of trouble with knowing what I needed to buy for her, especially when it came to clothes. That’s why my husband and I thought, we’d come up with a web tool for parents, to help them know what, and how much, to buy. Today you can give Bonica basic details about your baby and we’ll recommend exactly what you’d need.

Q. Tell us how you manage startup life and being a parent? Our daughter is currently in daycare. Of course, I would love to be the mom who works from home while watching her daughter but at 17 months, she’s running around and there’s no way I could get any work done. For the moms who can do that, I say, wow. I don’t know how they do it.

Q. You named your daughter (and later your startup) Bonica. How did you choose that name? It all started one day when my husband and I were making fun of people who name their kids strange things. These days parents come up with really interesting names for their kids and my husband and I knew we had competition. Since we both like the sitcom Friends, we decided to play with each of the character’s names and replace the first letter of each name with the letters of the alphabet until we got something that sounded nice.

We changed Pheobe to Bheobe and that sounded weird. Rachel became Brachel, and so on. When we got to Monica, that became Bonica and at that point we were like, “hey, that sounds pretty good.”

Later we were relieved that it means something good – Bonica actually means “beautiful” in Catalan.

Q. What are your earliest memories of entrepreneurship? I have always wanted to be an entrepreneur, since I was very young. I’m an only child and my parents are very supportive. They are both business people, and growing up I saw them as entrepreneurs and I knew early on that that was the kind of lifestyle I wanted. They have a clothes manufacturing facility, so I grew up seeing them do business together.  I think that also influenced me and my husband working together. But, sometimes it’s also hard to work with someone you’re so close to – there are times when you just want to say, “can’t you go and get another job somewhere else?”

Q. When you became an entrepreneur, were there any surprises? Being an entrepreneur is much harder than I thought actually. Initially, I thought startup life would be easy, but I soon realized when you become an entrepreneur, your whole life is taken over by the business. At least when you work you have the weekend. As an entrepreneur, you have to be very disciplined and you have to use it to balance your life, otherwise it will be just, endless work. Sometimes you have to stop and say, okay, this weekend is for family only.

Q. You and your husband came to Silicon Valley from New Haven. What has the experience been like? It has been a really great experience. We came here with an initial idea and we had to pivot many times as we get to know our users and what they needed. It’s been a very humbling and good experience for us.

Q. What is your advice for would-be entrepreneurs? Especially momtrepreneurs? There is nothing to loose if you are really passionate about what you want to do, just go for it because we only have this one life.

Sometimes you think that, you’re going to make it big right away and then you step back and realize how many obstacles there are and how you need to change your model. Don’t think about profits – think about how what you’re making is going to be useful to people.

I think entrepreneurship is more than just failure and success. It’s really the entire process. You get to enjoy and learn so much about yourself. It’s a discovery experience and I think if moms want to do this they should really go for it.

That said, be prepared incase it doesn’t work. Always have a backup plan.

Q. Do you hope some day that your daughter will become an entrepreneur? I think it will be up to her, but of course, if she has an entrepreneurial flare, we’ll support her all the way, just as my parents encouraged and supported me.

A group of female entrepreneurs from the Middle East, last week, visited Plug and Play Tech Center’s headquarters in Sunnyvale. The ladies learned about startup culture in the valley and around the world. We were honored to host them and had a great time.

This Thursday, Plug and Play was graced by a visit from Liz Gannes, Senior Editor at All Things D. Liz toured Plug and Play, met with our Founder, Saeed Amidi, our President, Canice Wu, and several startups, including Zyrion, BrightBlu and Credit Sesame. She even signed our “wall of fame.”