Ed Cowan Contributor Ed Cowan is an investment team member at TDM Growth Partners, a global investment firm with offices currently in Sydney and New York. Allbirds rings the bell on the Nasdaq today and has chosen an apt ticker to do it: BIRD. It started with a humble, natural wool (and extremely comfortable) shoe,
Month: November 2021
As companies deal with a growing array of privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA, they are looking for solutions that help them not only understand their customers better, but also help them comply with those laws in a less labor-intensive way. Bloutout, a member of the Y Combinator winter 2021 cohort, announced a $3 million
The ocean is vast and mysterious … but rather less so when you have thousands of little autonomous buoys reporting back interesting info to you every day. That’s just what Sofar Ocean has, and it just raised $39 million to scale up its vision of real-time understanding of the seven seas. The company operates what
Apple is furthering its investment in Original Podcasts with today’s debut of the new true crime-focused Apple Original Podcast “Hooked.” The nine-part series will explore the story of a top engineer, Tony Hathaway, whose addiction to opioids led him to become one of the most prolific bank robbers in U.S. history. The podcast is produced
Kneron has launched its first automotive-grade chip — fueled by funds from Foxconn, Alibaba, Sequoia, Horizons Ventures, and Qualcomm — that it says could revolutionize the path to vehicle autonomy. The chip industry has been dominated by legacy and tech companies like Intel, AMD and Qualcomm. Kneron – which has raised over $100 million to
When marketers Paul Benigeri and Geoffrey Woo were at their former companies, in food tech and e-commerce infrastructure, respectively, they experienced how manual and repetitive digital marketing workflows were, especially as the number of disparate and unintegrated marketing tools grew. With the goal of making their own lives easier, they formed Archive.ai in March to
In the days immediately following revelations that Kenya’s president Uhuru Kenyatta held secret wealth in offshore tax havens, Odanga Madung noticed something odd on Twitter. In spite of the damning information implicating Kenyatta in a hypocritical tax shelter scheme, the prevailing conversation on Kenyan Twitter focused on defending the country’s beleaguered leader. The Kenyan president’s
Battery Ventures released its State of the OpenCloud report today, providing a set of data points that pretty clearly outline the accelerated growth of cloud services in recent quarters. The report helps explain the race to invest capital into startups that we’ve been observing over the past 18 months. The pandemic pushed companies to start
Nigeria’s lending startup Payhippo has raised $3 million in a seed round, funding the company plans to use in sourcing the talent needed to optimize its technology as it ramps up effort to extend speedy credit to more small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the West African country. The round was led by an array
Oct.13 — Goldman Sachs Global Investment Banking Co-Head Dan Dees joins Bloomberg Technology’s Emily Chang about the importance of investing in tech, what’s better between traditional IPO, SPAC and direct listing, and the future of investing under mounting regulatory scrutiny worldwide.
Alternative assets, from bottles of fine wine to non-fungible tokens to even fractional shares of physical art, are becoming a mainstream form of modern investing. As consumers diversify their portfolios away from traditional public equities, New York-based startup Aqua is betting that the future may look a little more private. Co-founded by Rohan Marwaha and
Una Brands, the e-commerce aggregator focused on Asia-Pacific brands, announced today it has raised $15 million for its Series A. The full-equity round was co-led by White Star Capital and Alpha JWC, along with participation from returning investors and Ninjavan co-founder Alvin Teo. This news comes only five months after Una launched with a $40
Pearpop, a marketplace for social collaborations, is expanding to Instagram after previously only being available to TikTok creators. The platform, which launched last year, allows creators and brands to buy collaborations with celebrities and larger creators. Pearpop will also become available on Twitter later this month, and on Twitch in December. The official rollout on
After Nubank filed its F-1, Natasha Mascarenhas and Alex Wilhelm dissected the document to learn more about the operations of one of the world’s largest startups. “With over 40 million users across Brazil, as well as Mexico and Colombia,” the fintech company’s LTV/CAC ratio is central to its success, they found. Notably, as many as
After early tests in select markets, Netflix announced today its debut lineup of exclusive mobile games will begin rolling out to all members globally on Android devices, starting this week. In July, the streaming service first confirmed its plans to enter the mobile gaming market, calling games “another new content category” for the company to
German medical device maker Ottobock today announced that it has entered into a deal to acquire Bay Area-based exoskeleton startup SuitX. The deal is one that makes sense for Ottobock, which builds its own exoskeletons, along with prosthetics and orthotics. SuitX is a spinout from UC Berkeley’s Robotics and Human Engineering Lab, founded by mechanical
Lumigo, a cloud-native application monitoring and debugging platform, today announced that it has raised a $29 million Series A funding round led by Redline Capital. Wing Venture Capital and Vertex Ventures US, together with existing investors Meron Capital, Pitango First and Grove Ventures, also participated in this round, which brings the company’s total funding to
Just days after rebranding itself, Facebook announced plans to delete a trove of the most worrisome data that the world’s biggest social network collected on more than a billion individuals. In a blog post Tuesday, Facebook’s newly named parent company Meta explained that it would close shop on its facial recognition systems and delete a
How open is the IPO market for non-unicorns? Alex Wilhelm 8 hours When Backblaze first filed to go public, TechCrunch found it a compelling company. With a central core of content to help power customer acquisition and a huge swath of customers, it was an interesting cloud storage play. But when it came to pricing,
Walmart is further investing in technology that will enable shopping via voice and chat with its latest acquisition. The retail giant announced it’s acquiring “select technology assets” from a startup called Botmock, which had developed a set of tools for designing, prototyping, testing, and deploying conversational applications across platforms. Founded in 2016, Botmock got off
Everyone’s set of teeth are different enough that orthodontics has traditionally been part artistry, part medical witchcraft. In the late 1990s, Invisalign changed the industry with customizable aligners, but it turns out that aligners only serve 30% of orthodontics patients. For the rest, there hasn’t been much in the way of innovation — until LightForce
More of the world’s economy is moving online, and that is underscored by the long list of recent fundings and acquisitions in the digital ID authentication and anti-money laundering (AML) space, including Okta’s $6.5 billion acquisition of Auth0. Today, another startup announced it has raised capital: end-to-end due diligence platform First AML. Blackbird Ventures (which
WhatsApp will today begin beta testing a new, cloud-based version of its WhatsApp Business API, hosted on parent company Facebook’s infrastructure. With the shift to the cloud, the setup time for integrating with the API will drop from weeks to only minutes, the company claims, so businesses can more quickly transition to WhatsApp’s API platform
Electric vehicle startup BasiGo has today announced the launch of its operations in Nairobi, bringing clean energy options to Kenya’s public transport industry, currently dominated by fossil-fuel buses. The startup plans to sell locally assembled electric buses using parts from China’s EV maker BYD Automotive, the company said while announcing it had raised $1 million
Moka, a six-year-old Chinese startup that wants to make human resources management easier with software, said today it has closed a $100 million Series C round. The startup aims to automate the entire process of talent management, from hiring to retaining existing staff. For example, it can automatically collect post-interview feedback from candidates and store
Catherine D. Henry Contributor There is a heated debate on the state of the race between the United States and China to dominate in AI. But perhaps the more strategic question is whether China is building the metaverse. Built upon infrastructural technologies like AI, the metaverse refers to the vast array of digital experiences and
Opibus, the first company in Kenya to commercially future-proof diesel and gasoline vehicles by converting them to electric, is set to embark on an ambitious plan to mass produce electric buses and motorcycles after unlocking $7.5 million in pre series A round. The Swedish-Kenyan company raised $5 million in equity and $2.5 million in grants
Hello and welcome back to Max Q. It feels odd to be living in a time when companies are announcing their plans to develop commercial space stations and yet, here we are! Read on for news from Sierra Space, Blue Origin, Boeing and others on their plans for a station, called Orbital Reef. Plus this
ShopBack, the Rakuten-backed e-commerce loyalty platform, announced today it will acquire buy now, pay later startup Hoolah. Both companies are based in Singapore and operate in Southeast Asian markets. The deal was done in stock and cash, and terms were undisclosed. After the merger closes, ShopBack will own all of Hoolah, but the BNPL service’s
Instagram announced today that it’s introducing a new “Add Yours” sticker that creates public threads in Stories. The new feature essentially allows users to respond to other users’ Stories with their own following a prompt or a certain topic. The global launch comes as Instagram initially tested the feature in Indonesia and Japan last month.