Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. While the IPO cycle reprices former unicorns and concern imbues the private market with profit warnings, it turns out that there is still appetite for scooter startups. Even more, there’s hunger for both combinations in
Month: January 2020
Facebook’s internal “Supreme Court” can’t set precedents, can’t make decisions about Facebook Dating or Marketplace, and can’t oversee WhatsApp, Oculus, or any messaging feature, according to the bylaws Facebook proposed today for its Oversight Board. It’s designed to provide an independent appeals process for content moderation rulings. But it will only be able to challenge
RealityEngines.AI, an AI and machine learning startup founded by a number of former Google executives and engineers, is coming out of stealth today and announcing its first set of products. When the company first announced its $5.25 million seed round last year, CEO Bindu Reddy wasn’t quite ready to disclose RealityEngines’ mission beyond saying that
WholyMe, a London startup that makes and markets ‘natural relief’ products to manage chronic pain, has closed a £500,000 Seed round from investors Financière Saint James, V1 Capital, Guibor and business angels. The round also includes Joyance Partners, a New York-based VC concentrating on the new science emerging around ‘health and happiness’ which recently expanded
Growing up with blindness or low vision can be difficult for kids, not just because they can’t read the same books or play the same games as their sighted peers; Vision is also a big part of social interaction and conversation. This Microsoft research project uses augmented reality to help kids with vision impairment “see”
Last year saw global smartphone sales decline for the first time since analysts started tracking such things. In Gartner’s case, that comprises a full 11 years, as figures dropped 2% for 2019. Following on last week’s global device forecast, the firm is drilling down on smartphone figures with some slightly rosier results. According to the
Shipamax, the London-based startup and YC graduate that is helping freight forwarders and other logistics companies automate their back-office processes, has raised $7 million. Leading the round is Mosaic Ventures, with participation from Crane Venture Partners, Y Combinator, and other existing investors. Shipamax says it will use the funding to double in size over the
The value of tech-enabled companies is coming into focus as several American unicorns test the public markets. The data show that some venture-backed companies often grouped with technology companies are worth just a fraction of their tech-first cousins. By tech-enabled business, we mean a company that has a technology element to its operations but doesn’t
Marketing and sales automation — tools that leverage the advances and data of our digital age to better identify and then interact with customers — is big business, with the whole market expected to generate some $6.6 billion in revenues for related companies by 2025. But “companies” is the operative word here: it’s a very
The UK government will allow Chinese tech giant Huawei to play a limited role in supplying the country’s 5G networks, it has been announced today. The government said the package of restrictions being announced on “high risk” 5G vendors will allow it to “mitigate the potential risk posed by the supply chain and to combat
NASA has selected Houston-based Axiom Space, a startup founded in 2016, to build the first commercial habitat module for the International Space Station (ISS). This module will be used as a destination for future commercial spaceflight missions, potentially housing experiments, technology development and more performed by commercial space travellers taking rides up to the ISS
Berlin-based Merantix, a venture studio which specifically concentrates on building ‘AI companies’, says it has raised a new €25M fund ($27M). Anchor investors include Trusted Insight, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, as well as further family offices from Europe. Co-founder Adrian Locher said in a statement that the successful fundraising “underpins
Following Spotify’s confirmation of a new Stories feature, initially being tested by social media influencers, the company this morning announced it will now allow artists to reach their Instagram fan bases in a new way, too. However, in this case, they aren’t creating Spotify Stories they can market elsewhere on their social media, but instead
What if it was easier to eat salad than junk food? Most diet routines take a ton of time, whether you’re cooking from scratch, making a meal kit, or seeking out a nutritious restaurant. But on-demand prepared food delivery companies like Sprig that tried to eliminate that work have gone bankrupt from poor unit economics.
French startup ManoMano is raising another mega round of funding. The company operates an e-commerce website for DIY, home improvement and gardening products. This time, ManoMano is raising $139 million (€125 million) with Temasek leading the round. General Atlantic, Eurazeo, Piton Capital, Bpifrance and Kismet Holdings are also participating. The company announced another significant funding
AmazeVR, the Los Angeles-based virtual reality entertainment distribution service, is taking its first steps into the world of location-based virtual reality experiences with an installation in Seoul’s Incheon International Airport. The company, which also scored an additional $2.5 million commitment to expand its total funding to around $9 million, made the announcement last week. The
This morning Mural, a software startup focused on visual collaboration1, announced that it closed a $23 million Series A round of capital. The funds come after MURAL, formerly Mural.ly, had raised just a few million dollars previously. That fact made its round interesting: How did the company raise ten times its prior total in one
Kidtech startup SuperAwesome has raised an additional $17 million in funding, which includes a new strategic investment from Microsoft’s venture fund, M12. Others participating in the round include existing investors, Mayfair Equity, Hoxton Ventures, and Ibis, along with other angels. To date, SuperAwesome has raised $37 million in outside investment. SuperAwesome has been tapping into
It has been 10 years since Pantheon launched. At the time, it was mostly a hosting service for Drupal sites, but about six years ago, it added WordPress hosting to its lineup and raised more VC money as some of its competitors did the same. After its 2016 Series C round, things started quieting down,
If you didn’t see this coming, then clearly you didn’t have your eyes on the road. Bird, the LA-founded e-scooter giant, has confirmed that it is acquiring European competitor Circ, the micromobilty company founded by Lukasz Gadowski of Delivery Hero fame. The deal, for which terms remain undisclosed, was first reported by the FT late
Bizongo, one of the largest business-to-business online marketplaces for packaging needs in India, has raised $30 million in fresh funding round as it looks to widen its footprint in the nation and serve more categories. The new financing round, Series C, was led by Switzerland-based hedge fund Schroder Adveq, which manages assets worth $10 billion.
Challenger bank N26 has reached 5 million customers. In 2019 alone, N26 managed to add over 2.5 million customers. And the company’s growth rate seems to be accelerating as N26 reached 3.5 million customers in June 2019. That represents an addition of 1 million customers during the first half of 2019 and an addition of
We’re down in Sunnyvale, Calif., where Alchemist Accelerator is hosting a demo day for its most recent batch of companies. This is the 23rd class to graduate from Alchemist, with notable alums including LaunchDarkly, MightyHive, Matternet and Rigetti Computing. As an enterprise accelerator, Alchemist focuses on companies that make their money from other businesses, rather
Los Angeles is one of the most desirable locations for commercial real estate in the United States, so it’s little wonder that there’s something of a boom in investments in technology companies servicing the market coming from the region. It’s one of the reasons that CREXi, the commercial real estate marketplace, was able to establish
Try as they might, even the most advanced roboticists on Earth struggle to recreate the effortless elegance and efficiency with which birds fly through the air. The “PigeonBot” from Stanford researchers takes a step toward changing that by investigating and demonstrating the unique qualities of feathered flight. On a superficial level, PigeonBot looks a bit,
Welcome back to ThisWeek in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all. The app industry is as hot as ever with a record 204 billion downloads in 2019 and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019, according to App Annie’s recently released
The startup community has lost another moral leader today. Leila Janah, a serial entrepreneur who was the CEO and founder of machine learning training data company Samasource, passed away at the age of 37 due to complications from Epithelioid Sarcoma, a form of cancer, according to a statement from the company. She focused her career on
Descartes Labs, a well–funded startup based in New Mexico, provides businesses with geospatial data and the tools to analyze it in order to make business decisions. Today, the company announced the launch of its Descartes Labs Platform, which promises to bring its data together with all of the tools data scientists — including those with
The UK’s data protection watchdog has today published a set of design standards for Internet services which are intended to help protect the privacy and safety of children online. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has been working on the Age Appropriate Design Code since the 2018 update of domestic data protection law — as part
Xiaomi said today it is spinning off POCO, a sub-smartphone brand it created in 2018, as a standalone company that will now run independently of the Chinese electronics giant and make its own market strategy. The move comes months after a top POCO executive — Jai Mani, a former Googler — and some other founding
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