Perch, the vertically integrated platform for buying and selling homes, has today announced the close of a $36 million equity round led by Navitas, with participation from existing investor FirstMark Capital, Juxtapose and Accomplice. The company is also announcing that it is rebranding from Perch to Orchard. Orchard launched in September of 2017 with a
Month: January 2020
The hardest challenges to tackle are usually the most nebulous. Culture, for example, is hard to define, implement, cultivate and evolve… How do you structure culture within a business or organization? Are there steps to follow? Is there a manual? Interestingly enough, there is. What You Do Is Who You Are is the latest book
If you haven’t scored a ticket yet to our 3rd Annual Winter Party at Galvanize, now’s your chance. We just released another batch of tickets to the best Silicon Valley soiree. Shake off your post-holiday doldrums and join the movers and shakers of the startup community at Galvanize in San Francisco on February 7. Last year,
According to newly released third-party data, TikTok has reason to dance. The famous short-video application saw its in-app purchase revenue rise 310% on a year-over-year basis, according to Apptopia, a startup that tracks mobile app revenue and usage. (The Boston-based startup has raised $8.2 million to date and competes with AppAnnie.) TikTok’s revenue gains are impressive
One Medical, a San Francisco-based primary care startup with tech-infused, concierge services filed for an IPO with the Securities and Exchange Commission today. Internal medicine doctor Tom Lee founded the startup, now valued at well-over $1 billion dollars, in 2007. Lee exited his company in 2017, leaving it in the hands of former UnitedHealth group
Hello and welcome back to our regular moning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Today we’re digging into the One Medial S-1 IPO filing. The company, popular in Silicon Valley and known for an investment from Alphabet, intends to debut this year on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol
The recovery in value of several high-profile electric car companies could help move yet-private EV manufacturers out of the pit lane and onto the IPO track. On the heels of NIO’s shocking value appreciation after its recent earnings report, and Tesla’s own public market run, China-based Lixiang Automotive is reported to have filed privately for
Cloudflare announced that it has acquired S2 Systems, a browser isolation startup started by former Microsoft execs. The two companies did not reveal the acquisition price. Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO at Cloudflare, says that this acquisition is part of a new suite of products called Cloudflare for Teams, which has been designed to protect
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Today we’re digging into seed-stage companies, the vanguard of the venture market. In particular, we’re trying to understand why the ratio of seed deals now favor enterprise startups over their consumer-focused brethren. The fact that
After acquiring Ukraine startup Looksery in 2015 to supercharge animated selfie lenses in Snapchat — arguably changing the filters game for all social video and photo apps — Snap has made another acquisition with roots in the country, co-founded by one of Looksery’s founders, to give a big boost to its video capabilities. The company
Bharatiya Janata Party, the ruling party in India, has been accused of running a highly deceptive Twitter campaign to trick citizens into supporting a controversial law. First, some background: The Indian government passed the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) last month that eases the path of non-Muslim minorities from the neighboring Muslim-majority nations of Afghanistan, Bangladesh
Twitter has kicked off the New Year by taking the wraps off a new hub for academic researchers to more easily access information and support around its APIs — saying the move is in response to feedback from the research community. The new page — which it’s called ‘Twitter data for academic researchers’ — can
More details are emerging about the scale and scope of disgraced data company Cambridge Analytica’s activities in elections around the world — via a cache of internal documents that’s being released by former employee and self-styled whistleblower, Brittany Kaiser. The now shut down data modelling company, which infamously used stolen Facebook data to target voters
China’s TikTok, which has taken the world by storm, is working its magic in its home nation, too. The Chinese version of TikTok, called Douyin, has amassed 400 million daily active users, parent company ByteDance revealed in its annual report this week (in Chinese). This is an impressive growth for the addictive video app, which had
Facebook wants to be the arbiter of truth after all. At least when it comes to intentionally misleading deepfakes and heavily manipulated and/or synthesized media content, such as AI-generated photorealistic human faces that look like real people but aren’t. In a policy update announced late yesterday, the social network’s VP of global policy management, Monika
Space attracts a lot of attention as an area of frontier tech investment and entrepreneurship, but there’s another vast expanse that could actually be more addressable by the innovation economy — Earth’s oceans. Seafaring startups aren’t attracting quite as much attention as their spacefaring cousins, but 2019 still saw a flurry of activity in this
It would be hard to top the 2018 enterprise M&A total of a whopping $87 billion, and predictably this year didn’t come close. In fact, the top 10 enterprise M&A deals in 2019 were less than half last year’s, totaling $40.6 billion. This year’s biggest purchase was Salesforce buying Tableau for $15.7 billion, which would
In Marc Benioff’s book, Trailblazer, he tells the tale of how Steve Jobs planted the seeds of the idea that would become the first enterprise app store, and how Benioff eventually paid Jobs back with the gift of the AppStore.com domain. While Salesforce did truly help blaze a trail when it launched as an enterprise
Back in 2013, Dropbox was scaling fast. The company had grown quickly by taking advantage of cloud infrastructure from Amazon Web Services (AWS), but when you grow rapidly, infrastructure costs can skyrocket, especially when approaching the scale Dropbox was at the time. The company decided to build its own storage system and network — a
A few days before Christmas, TechCrunch caught up with CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz to chat about his company’s public offering, direct listings and his expectations for the 2020 IPO market. We also spoke about CrowdStrike’s product niche — endpoint security — and a bit more on why he views his company as the Salesforce of
Almost exactly 4 months to the day after BigID announced a $50 million Series C, the company was back today with another $50 million round. The Series C extension came entirely from Tiger Global Management. The company has raised a total of $144 million. What warrants $100 million in interest from investors in just four
AWS took a hard blow last year when it lost the $10 billion, decade-long JEDI cloud contract to rival Microsoft. Yet even without that mega deal for building out the nation’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, the company remains fully in control of the cloud infrastructure market — and it intends to fight that decision. In
Shipfix, a relatively new startup aiming to drag the dry cargo shipping industry into the digital age, has raised $4.5 million in seed funding. Leading the round is Idinvest Partners, with participation from Kima Ventures, The Family, Bpifrance and strategic business angels. The company was founded in December 2018 by Serge Alleyne (CEO) and Antoine
Trussle, the online mortgage broker backed by the likes of Goldman Sachs, LocalGlobe, Finch Capital and Seedcamp, has lost its founding CEO. Ishaan Malhi, who co-founded the fintech startup five years ago, has resigned with “immediate effect,” according to a rather brief press release issued by Trussle this morning. The company is now searching for
Over the past year, startup banks have proven that they have a shot at disrupting retail banking. These challengers have amassed a war chest of funding, announced some ambitious international expansion plans and attracted millions of customers. And yet, building a bank has proven to be even harder than building a startup in general. Retail
Antler, the self-described “global startup generator” and early-stage venture capital firm, has raised an additional $50 million for its funds in Amsterdam, London, New York, Stockholm, Sydney, Nairobi and Singapore. Notable new investors include Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin and Elaine Saverin; investor and philanthropist Christen Sveeas (via Kistefos); Canica International; and the innovative Japanese financial
Juro, a UK startup that’s using machine learning tech and user-centric design to do for contracts what Typeform does for online forms, has caught the eye of Union Square Ventures. The New York-based fund leads a $5 million Series A investment that’s being announced this morning. Also participating in the Series A are existing investors
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has made responding to technology-driven change a key priority for her five year term which began last month, setting it in the same breath as challenges posed by climate change and demographic shifts, tacitly linking all three to a rise in regional unease. Her solution, set out in
Until now, Brilliant only offered its relatively high-end smart switches with a touchscreen, but at CES this week, the company is expanding its product lineup with a new dimmer switch and smart plug. Both require that you already own at least one Brilliant Control, so these aren’t standalone devices but instead expansions to the Brilliant
Echodyne set the radar industry on its ear when it debuted its pocket-sized yet hyper-capable radar unit for drones and aircraft. But these days all the action is in autonomous vehicles — so they reinvented their technology to make a unique sensor that doesn’t just see things but can communicate intelligently with the AI behind