Month: June 2020

Planck, an AI-based data platform for insurance underwriting, announced today that it has raised a $16 million Series B led by Team8 Capital. All of the startup’s existing investors—Viola FinTech, Arbor Ventures and Eight Roads—also participated, while Nationwide and Hannover Digital Investments joined as strategic investors. Based in New York, Planck provides large insurance companies
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Following the launch of Inbox.ai in March — its “Slack for external communications” — Amsterdam-headquartered MessageBird is continuing to place big bets on a messaging-first future. Not content with building a platform for customer service teams that lets them communicate with customers on a channel of their choosing, including all of the most popular messaging
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After a series of developer previews, Google today released the first beta of Android 11 and with that, it is also making these pre-release versions available for over-the-air updates. This time around, the list of supported devices only includes the Pixel 2, 3, 3a and 4. If you’re brave enough to try this early version
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Platforms still aren’t doing enough to tackle disinformation related to the coronavirus crisis, the European Commission said today. In a Communication it is pressing tech platforms to produce monthly reports about their efforts in this area, asking for more detailed data on actions being taken to promote authoritative content; improve users’ awareness; and limit coronavirus
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It’s a winner-takes-all economy. More and more labor markets act as lotteries, where a couple of “superstar” workers make extremely outsized returns relative to their peers — who may well have started from the exact same starting line. In the tech world, two JavaScript engineers can potentially earn billions of dollars in differential compensation by
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The IBM Cloud is currently suffering a major outage, and with that, multiple services that are hosted on the platform are also down, including everybody’s favorite tech news aggregator, Techmeme. It looks like the problems started around 2:30pm PT and spread from there. Best we can tell, this is a worldwide problem and involves a
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Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This time around we’re recording what we call an Equity Shot, a single-topic show that we pull together whenever there’s a news item of sufficient weight that it demands we break our regular cadence and record a little
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New York-based fintech startup Wahed (meaning “One” in Arabic) describes itself as a digital Islamic investment platform and as the world’s first “halal robo adviser.” It has now closed a $25 million investment round led by Saudi Aramco Entrepreneurship Ventures (also known as Wa’ed Ventures), a venture capital investment arm of oil giant Saudi Aramco.
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