Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, February 13

• SoundCloud loses key executives amid fundraising drive: Music-streaming service SoundCloud has lost two senior executives and is seeking to raise new funding, the company said on Sunday, but denied a Financial Times report that it was running low on cash. Marc Strigel, SoundCloud's chief operating officer, and finance director Markus Harder left after five years with the company to pursue new opportunities, a spokeswoman for Berlin-based SoundCloud said, without giving details. "SoundCloud is currently fundraising, which is typical of most startups of our size and in our phase of growth," the spokeswoman said, denying an assertion by an anonymous source quoted by the FT as saying it was seeking financing in "desperation." The firm raised $100 million last June from a group of investors including Twitter, half the $193 million it has taken in since its founding in 2008, according to Crunchbase data. The FT's source said SoundCloud was looking to raise funds while seeking to avoid accepting a lower valuation than the roughly $700 million when it last raised money. SoundCloud is popular among music artists, but has been less successful at striking licensing deals on favorable terms with major music labels than rivals Spotify and Apple Music. The SoundCloud spokeswoman reported business as usual, saying the executive departures were unrelated to its fundraising. The company said in a report filed early in January that it made a loss of 48.7 million euros ($51.8 million) after tax during the 2015 calendar year.

• Infosys Founders Said to Question Payments for CEO, Managers: The board of Infosys Ltd., India’s second-largest technology services company, is facing questions over executive compensation and corporate governance in a letter sent by at least three of its founders, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Narayana Murthy, Nandan Nilekani and Kris Gopalakrishnan have signed the document asking why Chief Executive Officer Vishal Sikka’s compensation was increased, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified discussing the contents of a private memo. Sikka was paid 487 million rupees ($7.3 million) in base salary, bonus and benefits last year, compared with a base salary of 45.6 million rupees for a partial period in 2015. The letter also questioned severance packages offered to two top-level executives who departed the company. Infosys shares listed in New York rose 3.3 percent to close at $14.57, the highest in a month. The stock declined 11 percent in 2016. Infosys’s revenue is projected to climb 10 percent in the current fiscal year, compared with 17 percent prior, as clients cut back on spending. Cloud-computing and automation of information-technology tasks are disrupting Infosys’s business model of charging man hours for application development, infrastructure maintenance and other work that keeps corporate computer systems and networks up and running. “Infosys is behaving in a much more non-transparent manner than in the past,” said Shriram Subramanian, managing director of corporate governance researcher InGovern. “At the same time, Infosys’ co-founders seem unable to cut off their umbilical cord with the company.”