Month: April 2020

Looks like things haven’t gone completely smoothly with Quibi‘s launch. The issue appears to have been resolved, but the Quibi customer support account tweeted this afternoon that “some users may be experiencing problems with the Quibi app,” only to add an hour later that “Users should once again be able to use the Quibi app
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Koch Industries announced today that it has closed on the acquisition of Infor, announced in February. The company never officially announced the purchase price, but sources indicated that it was close to $13 billion, putting it in line to be one of the top 10 enterprise acquisitions this year. The company will remain an independent subsidiary
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The UK government is reportedly looking at a range of options to support the startup industry, possibly involving a co-investment model involving state-owned funds (via the British Business Bank) and private VC funds. Investors have been warning that typically loss-making, early-stage startups are at risk of collapse amid the coronavirus crisis. But the moves come
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Fintech startup Lydia is the dominating mobile payment app in France with most of its 3.3 million users in its home country. That’s why the startup has been working hard over the past ten days to ship a feature that was originally planned for this summer — donations to charities and hospitals. Starting today, Lydia users
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Yapily, one of a number of fintech startups that offer an opening banking API to let enterprises, such as financial service providers and merchants, connect to banks, has raised $13 million in Series A funding. Leading the round is Lakestar, which is also a backer of fintech unicorn Revolut. Existing investors HV Holtzbrinck Ventures, and
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Quibi, the much-hyped mobile app promising to deliver “quick bites” of video entertainment, is finally here. The company has been in the headlines for more than two years, thanks to the involvement of founder Jeffrey Katzenberg (who previously co-founded DreamWorks Animation) and CEO Meg Whitman (previously the CEO of eBay and Hewlett Packard Enterprise). Plus,
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Jason Shen Contributor Jason Shen is a three-time startup founder and the CEO of Midgame, a gaming technology company backed by Techstars and Betaworks. It’s no secret that adaptability has become a critical trait for knowledge workers. To stay on top of a rapidly evolving world, we must assess new situations, make intelligent decisions and
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Forward Partners, the early-stage venture fund and startup studio, has long offered something a little different to the U.K’s tech startup ecosystem, and today the VC is continuing that trend with the launch of “Forward Advances,” a revenue-based finance solution for startups that need to bolster marketing. Aimed at “fast-growing” e-commerce, marketplace and B2C SaaS
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As of this writing, nearly a million people globally have been infected with the novel coronavirus and 50,322 have died. Healthcare systems are overwhelmed, consumers and profiteers are hoarding supplies and some service workers have launched strikes while many others have been let go. In the world of micromobility, we’ve seen Bird lay off hundreds
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Neil Sequeira was a managing director with General Catalyst for more than 13 years before co-founding early-stage firm Defy several years ago with another veteran of the industry, Trae Vassallo, who’d spent the dozen years prior with Kleiner Perkins. We caught up with Sequeira yesterday afternoon and discussed whether he’s seeing valuations come down and
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Hardware engineering is mostly document-based. A typical satellite might be described in several hundred thousand PDF documents, spreadsheets, simulation files and more; all potentially inconsistent between each other. This can lead to costly mistakes. NASA lost a $125 million Mars orbiter because one engineering team used metric units while another used English units, for instance.
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