Month: December 2021

Fintech startup LiveFlow has raised a $3.5M Seed round which was led by Moonfire Ventures with backing from Y Combinator, Seedcamp and WndrCo.  Also participating was Victor Jacobsson, co-founder of Klarna; Bradley Horowitz, former VP Product at Google; Oliver Jung, former VP International Expansion at AirBnB, Phillip Chambers, Peakon founder & CEO, and others. LiveFlow
0 Comments
With traction metrics that would make any startup CFO foam at the mouth, TikTok influencer marketing platform Ubiquitous is making a big splash in the chaotic market of influencer marketing. It’s one of the fastest-growing segments of advertising and marketing, but one that brings some unique challenges; working with influencers directly is labor-intensive, but results
0 Comments
Creator monetization startups are cropping up left and right as the tech world embraces the fast-growing creator economy. But Patreon, founded in 2013, has been around since before words like “influencer” were in our vocabulary — back when “Tik Tok” was a Kesha song, rather than the social platform that everyone is trying to emulate.
0 Comments
The European Union’s competition regulator has given the all-clear to Microsoft’s $19.7 billion purchase of transcription tech firm Nuance, which was announced earlier this year. The EU said today it has concluded there are no competition concerns for the region if the acquisition goes ahead, clearing it without conditions. The deal was notified to the
0 Comments
Last year’s Essential implosion marked one of the most high-profile consumer electronics startup failures in recent memory. Launched in 2017 with $330 million, a killer pedigree and some truly grand ambitions, the company sputtered through a combination of industry issues, disappointment and troubling allegations against founder Andy Rubin. The firm’s IP was eventually purchased by
0 Comments
Jamie Viggiano Contributor Jamie Viggiano is the chief marketing officer at Fuel Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm investing in consumer, SaaS and infrastructure businesses. More posts by this contributor 5 questions startups should consider before making their first marketing hire To create successful growth strategies, relevant marketing campaigns and products that deliver real value
0 Comments
It’s my last day of work for the year, so we’re going to have some fun. Obviously, we’re talking crypto this morning. Jack Dorsey, former Twitter CEO and present CEO of Block, the company formerly known as Square, stirred the crypto pot recently, making explicit his preferences in the larger blockchain landscape by taking swipes
0 Comments
Tackle.io, an Idaho-based startup that helps software companies sell through cloud marketplaces such as AWS’s, announced today it has raised a $100 million Series C funding round. Co-led by Coatue and Andreessen Horowitz, the round also saw participation from Bessemer Venture Partners. Bringing Tackle’s total funding to $148 million, the Series C turned Tackle into
0 Comments
In 2019, when LinkedIn began asking for Chinese users’ phone numbers, it was clear that the professional social network would have to follow a different set of rules in the country. But it realized simply setting up the real-name verification regime required by Chinese authorities wasn’t enough; it faced a mounting task of balancing Beijing’s
0 Comments
Stenon, an AgTech company that has a real-time soil-sensing solution, has raised a $20 million Series A funding round from Founders Fund, David Friedberg’s The Production Board, and existing investors including Cherry Ventures and Atlantic Labs. Founded in 2018 in Potsdam, Germany, Stenon’s digital soil data is produced without the need for a laboratory, making it faster
0 Comments
Rocket Companies announced this morning that it will purchase Truebill for $1.275 billion in cash. Rocket Companies is best known for its Rocket Mortgage product, while Truebill is a consumer-facing app that helps consumers manage subscriptions, automate savings and budget. The deal’s price tag will prove lucrative for Truebill shareholders. PitchBook data indicates that Truebill’s
0 Comments
The European e-scooter market is currently the main battleground for companies playing in the micromobility space, taking advantage as they are of Europe’s relatively compact cities and the desire of populations to move to more sustainable transportation. In 2021, players like Tier, Voi and Dott continued to raise VC backing. But the war for funding
0 Comments
Jamie Viggiano Contributor Jamie Viggiano is the chief marketing officer at Fuel Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm investing in consumer, SaaS and infrastructure businesses. More posts by this contributor 5 questions startups should consider before making their first marketing hire To be effective, each element of your brand’s ethos must be authentic. Your values
0 Comments
The relentless march of social media apps’ algorithmic advertising hooks, influencer-leveraged social graphs and UX that begs for endless scrolling have led to viral success and mass-market engagement for the biggest players. But there remains a continuing gap in the market for products that let us create things like photos and share them with selected
0 Comments
In its latest (and last) pre-Christmas document reveal, European privacy advocacy group, noyb, has published details of an 86-page internal assessment by Facebook of its (continued) transfers of European’s personal data to the US — and the resulting conclusion can be best summed up as ‘The Emperor, Mark Zuckerberg, Has No Clothes’. The convoluted back
0 Comments
GDevelop is a game engine that lets you develop a video game without any specific development experience. While the ‘no-code’ trend has been quite popular this year, GDevelop has been around for a few years already. Florian Rival first started working on GDevelop as an open-source side project. The first public version on GitHub was
0 Comments