Month: February 2022

Jambo, a Congo-based startup building Africa’s web3 user acquisition portal through “learn, play, earn” and democratizing access to crypto-based income-generation opportunities, has raised $7.5 million in seed funding. Experts say Africa is poised to be disrupted by web3 in a similar fashion that has seen Southeast Asia become one of the best markets for web3.
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Crowdfunding has become an increasingly popular way for companies to raise capital, and investors are taking notice. Groundfloor, the first real estate crowdfunding platform to gain regulatory approval, announced today that it raised its first round of institutional capital since 2015. Brian Dally, a former mobile network exec, and Nick Bhargava, a co-author of the
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Volta Trucks — the Swedish electric vehicle startup that believes it can build better urban delivery vehicles and other trucks that are safer and take up a smaller carbon footprint than their gas-guzzling, more clumsy, existing counterparts — has closed a big round of funding to help it through that last mile of work before
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Shopify CEO Harley Finkelstein joins Emily Chang on the heels of their earnings. The Amazon rival came in with a successful fourth quarter, beating analyst estimates for revenue and profit and turning the tide after a previous rocky period. Shopify expects revenue growth to be lower as online spending resets post-Covid this year. He speaks
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LG’s innovation center — LG Nova among friends — today announced that it has selected the first 50 companies for its Mission for the Future global challenge competition. From 1,300 applicants, the company picked its first cohort to start building opportunities with the startups. Nova itself is a counterpoint to profit-focused corporate venture capital outfits,
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Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. Since launching the venture firm Backstage Capital in 2015, Arlan Hamilton has invested millions in more than 195 companies led by underrepresented founders, from a duo taking on auto insurance to a
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Since launching the venture firm Backstage Capital in 2015, Arlan Hamilton has invested millions in more than 195 companies led by underrepresented founders, from a duo taking on auto insurance to a team rethinking how we virtually learn. Despite the breadth in the business, Hamilton says she is consistently asked two questions by her portfolio
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Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This week, Natasha and Alex and Mary Ann got together with Chris and Grace to rock our regular Friday news roundup. This time, however, with extra zip, as we’re staring down a long weekend that,
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ICON, which creates homes using 3D printing, has raised an additional $185 million in a round led by Tiger Global Management, TechCrunch has learned exclusively. The financing is said to be an extension of ICON’s $207 million Series B that was announced last August. While the Austin-based company confirmed the latest raise, it declined to
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Retailers have traditionally onboarded their drop-ship, marketplace and wholesale suppliers using electronic data interchange (EDI), which is a fancy way of saying information that is sent from one company to another electronically. However, setting up this process can take months, time most retailers don’t have if they want to get ahead in Amazon’s world. In
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Delivery has become one of the fastest growing verticals for robotics investments amid pandemic-related shutdowns. There’s been plenty of interest in the category over the years, but Covid-19 has accelerated interest on all sides of the equation. Among this category, however, Agility stands out – in more ways than one. Born out of research from
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The public markets may have cooled on fintechs in recent months, but for entrepreneurs who are still considering starting up, “outlook good,” says the Magic 8 Ball. In 2021, one-third of all unicorns created were fintech companies: investor FOMO, increased use of digital payments, BNPL, and other financial services created a gravitational field that attracted
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I fully confess I was a skeptic when Samsung unveiled the first Note. And I certainly wasn’t alone among the crowd at the Messe Berlin that IFA. The 5.3-inch display was unimaginably large in a year when the average screen measured a hair over 3.5 inches. The stylus graced the phone like a vestigial organ
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Amanda Milligan Contributor Amanda Milligan is head of marketing at Stacker Studio, a newsroom and newswire that partners with brands to create and distribute content to high-quality news publications, earning brand authority and links. More posts by this contributor 3 strategies for elevating brand authority in 2021 6 reasons why reporters aren’t interested in your
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Further evidence of the booming Portuguese tech ecosystem is emerging today with the news that venture capital firm Shilling is topping-up its ‘Founders Fund’ to €52 million ($59M), with €22M ($23M) more than the primary announcement last April. Significantly for Europe where often VC funds are backed by the sometimes constraining European Investment Fund, this
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