Month: January 2023

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 Mascarenhas, Mary Ann Azevedo and Rebecca Szkutak took the mic to talk through breaking news, retrospective features and all the blogosphere content that fits in between. Shout-out to Theresa and Andrew for putting together
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Brendan Wallace’s ambition is beginning to seem almost limitless. The L.A.-based venture firm that Wallace and cofounder Brad Greiwe launched less than seven years ago already has $3.2 billion in assets under management. But that firm, Fifth Wall, which argues there are massive financial returns at the intersection of real estate and tech, isn’t worried
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Despite Canva being worth in the region of $26 billion, it appears startups feel there is still plenty to be mined from this “easy-to-use design platform” arena. Admittedly, Professional Adobe tools remain fiddly for most people. Perhaps that’s why Berlin-based startup Kittl has now raised a €10.8 million ($11.6 million) Series A for its design
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Kano, the venture-backed U.K. startup known for its build-your-own computer kits and software for teaching coding and associated STEM skills, has accused Warner Bros. of copying one of its products and infringing on its intellectual property (IP). The product in question is the Harry Potter: Magic Caster Wand that Warner Bros. announced back in October, and which
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Jefferies Analyst Brent Thill joins Caroline Hyde and Ed Ludlow to break down Microsoft’s earnings beating the average analyst estimate. Follow Bloomberg for business news & analysis, up-to-the-minute market data, features, profiles and more: http://www.bloomberg.com Connect with us on… Twitter: https://twitter.com/business Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bloombergbusiness/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/quicktake/?hl=en
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Earlier this month, we reported that investors’ sentiments surrounding venture capital activity going into this were more reserved than upbeat. Investors believe the market correction, which caught up with the continent in the second half of 2022, will spiral into this year. But before that, there was shared optimism that African startups would raise more
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Seen through the lens of His Royal Highness, Prince Constantijn Haje Jan Kamps 9 hours I find something very intriguing about members of a royal family working to further the startup scene for a particular country. In a magnificently frank conversation, I spoke with HRH Prince Constantijn, fourth in line to the throne of the
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An impressive new AI system from Google can generate music in any genre given a text description. But the company, fearing the risks, has no immediate plans to release it. Called MusicLM, Google’s certainly isn’t the first generative AI system for song. There’s been other attempts, including Riffusion, an AI that composes music by visualizing
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Earlier this week, I wrote a story about EV charging company Orange and how it is taking a different approach to putting chargers everywhere. Instead of a few high-speed chargers, it makes it easy for multifamily dwellings (think apartment buildings) to put charger sockets everywhere there might be EVs, taking care of billing and such
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Chroma, a startup working to build a new type of audiovisual entertainment specifically for mobile devices, is now adding a Twitter co-founder to its board. The company announced today that Twitter and Medium co-founder Biz Stone, previously an angel investor in Chroma alongside Pinterest’s founders, will join the company’s board of directors to contribute his
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Conor Burke spent much of his career in the back office of a big bank in Ireland. His team was tasked with digitizing the onboarding process — particularly document-heavy manual review workflows — that were costing the bank millions of dollars every year and not catching fraud. According to him, the biggest challenge was figuring
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Newsletter platform Substack announced today that it’s introducing several new features, including private Substacks. A private Substack is a publication that you can host alone or readers can request to subscribe to read your posts. Writers can choose to approve or decline each subscription request. In a blog post, Substack explained that private Substack accounts
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Method, a startup that aims to make it easier for fintech developers to embed repayment, balance transfers and bill pay automation into their apps, today announced that it closed a $16 million Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Y Combinator (Method’s a Y Combinator graduate), Abstract Ventures, SV Angel and
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