As Snapchat’s app continues to grow, the company is turning to the open source community to help further improve its technology infrastructure. This morning, Snap announced it’s acquiring the Toronto-based KeyDB, the developer of an open-source, high-performance database, for an undisclosed sum. The startup’s six-person team, including its co-founders John Sully and Ben Schermel, will
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Michael Broughton was the first in his family to go to college. But he almost didn’t, when he had trouble securing the necessary financing to pay his tuition. The experience stuck with him, and when he met Ayush Jain at the University of Southern California, the pair bonded over their belief that credit access should
Grocery delivery unicorn Instacart filed privately to go public yesterday, a long-awaited event for the well-known private company. During its startup days, Instacart raised huge amounts of capital and grew rapidly. When the pandemic arrived, Instacart’s business turbo-charged as demand for its service reached a fever pitch. The last year has been less kind. Growth slowed as
Twitter GM of Consumer, Keyvon Beykpour, announced today he will be leaving the company after seven years. Beykpour first joined the social media platform by way of its acquisition of Periscope, which he founded, said in a tweet he was asked to leave by current CEO Parag Agrawal, who wants to take the team in
During the pandemic especially, it’s become overwhelming for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to answer all of their customer service requests. A Freshworks survey found that companies experienced a 71% increase in overall contact volume between February 2020 and January 2021, and expect it to increase further. At the same time, customers — while empathetic
The rise of digital payments has changed the nature of how people do business with each other; and open banking — a movement in banking where incumbents are finally adopting newer technology such as APIs to open their systems to modern integrations — is leading to a wave of new payment methods, all of which
Most of the time no one has to think about how the mobile networks we all rely on work. But it won’t surprise many to hear that, as is often the case with infrastructure, some pieces are the latest tech and others haven’t changed in decades. Eridan is a well-funded startup aiming to replace one
It’s been said that no one uses Alexa for voice-based shopping. But retail giant still sees the potential for Alexa as a shopping companion — just in a different way. That’s why this month the company quietly rolled out a new feature designed to boost consumers’ use of Alexa’s Shopping Lists: cashback offers. The company
A few months after raising $1 billion, payments startup Checkout.com has announced that it plans to acquire French startup Ubble, which operates a remote identity verification service. The deal should close later this year and Checkout.com isn’t disclosing the terms of the deal. With this acquisition, Checkout.com is adding a new product to its suite
Recurring revenue as an asset class is a relatively new concept, and made more popular by startups such as Pipe, which has built a marketplace connecting investors to companies with businesses that have predictable, recurring revenues. While Pipe has gone on to so far raise over $300 million and was valued at $2 billion last
While the world continues to wonder what ‘free speech absolutist‘ and gadfly billionaire Elon Musk might mean for the future of Twitter, the European Union has chalked up an early PR win in the long game of platform regulation — extracting agreement from the Tesla founder that its freshly rebooted approach toward content policy sounds
During a developer keynote at Google I/O 2022, Google unveiled Cloud Run jobs, an extension of Google Cloud’s service for developing and deploying containerized apps using languages including Go, Python and Java. Cloud Run jobs are designed for containers that run to completion and don’t serve requests, such as data processing and administrative jobs, and
More consolidation is apace in the world of payments: Nexi, the Italian fintech that scooped up rivals Danish-based Nets and then Italy’s SIA to create a $12.5 billion European payments giant, has made another acquisition, this time to dig deeper into financial services for small and medium businesses in the region. It has fully acquired
If you’ve always wanted Giancarlo Esposito — the actor playing the meth-slinging Los Pollos Hermanos boss Gustavo Fring from “Breaking Bad” — to guide you through your choice of music, ho boy does Sonos have a treat for you. Esposito lent his voice to a Sonos speaker near you, alongside its long-awaited voice control feature
Yes, the Pixel Watch is the thing. Google undoubtedly took some of the wind out of its own sails (and, perhaps, sales) by talking up a number of products we won’t be seeing for several months — and, in one case, a year — but let’s focus on the here and now for a moment.
Zeals, a Tokyo-based startup that lets businesses communicate with their customers via its chat application, said Thursday it has secured $27.2 million (3.5 billion yen) in equity and $11.6 million (1.5 billion yen) in debt. The latest round brings its total funding raised to $41.4 million, the company said without disclosing its valuation. JIC Venture
Good Startup founders Gautam Godhwani and Jayesh Parekh Good Startup, a Singapore-based venture capital firm focused on alternative protein, has closed its latest fund. Consisting of $34 million, the new fund, called Good Protein Fund I, included participation from Vinmar International founder and chairman Vijay Goradia; former head of finance and strategy for Fidelity Investments
A controversial Texas law that would open social media companies up to lawsuits from aggrieved users just notched a surprise win. A trio of federal appeals court judges issued the ruling Wednesday, which pauses a temporary injunction that blocked the law from taking effect last year. The law, HB 20, would prohibit tech platforms from
I’ve been learning Arabic for a couple of years, after one of my previous startups had a large-ish team of developers in Egypt. Even though I’m only a novice, I did spot something truly bizarre in today’s keynote at Google I/O: A bunch of the languages on the slide are … wrong? The text in
The United Kingdom has a small but growing space industry, with the number of space-related organizations increasing by an average of 21 percent each year since 2012, but there is one key component it’s lacking — launches. There have been no space launches from U.K. soil, but that’s about to change. The U.K. has announced
DJI has just introduced a new drone — its most capable ever to squeak under the 250 gram limit that keeps operators free from a whole host of headaches and restrictions for flight (note that local laws and rules still do apply — being small doesn’t mean you can do anything you want). The DJI
Last August, Google tried something different. The company offered a sneak peek at the Pixel 6 several months ahead of its official announcement. The reasoning seemed sound. The company had spent several years working to reinvigorate the flagging smartphone line, and it was ready to show it off. Even more importantly, it wanted to build
Indoor navigation was something we heard about a lot after the launch of the iPhone and during that first wave of location-based apps. But the technology has quietly evolved over the last few years and may now be more important than ever. Oriient, which powers the platform that Instacart shoppers use to gather their orders
Remote hiring company Deel has raised $50 million at a $12 billion valuation, according to an Axios report. Axios’ Dan Primack broke the news this morning, citing anonymous sources. He wrote that “new investors include Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective, while existing company backers include Andreessen Horowitz, Spark Capital and Y Combinator.” To say that
Twitter announced today that it has rolled out a new web video game to make it easier for users to understand its privacy policy. The goal of the game, which is called Data Dash, is to educate people on the information that Twitter collects, how the information is used and what controls users have over
When AWS launched its storage offering in 2006, it began a march to offer compute, storage and database services in the cloud. Google, Microsoft, Alibaba and IBM among others would follow. One player that might not be top of mind in this market is Cloudflare, but with its announcement today of a new SQL database
The European Union has formally presented its proposal to move from a situation in which some tech platforms voluntarily scan for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) to something more systematic — publishing draft legislation that will create a framework which could obligate digital services to use automated technologies to detect and report existing or new
The last thing we need in this world is more guns. But we’re getting them whether we like it or not, so wouldn’t it be nice if those guns had safety mechanisms like our phones, making them impossible for anyone but their owners to use? That’s what Biofire is building, and it has raised $17
YouTube is expanding on its latest feature that made any public YouTube video potential fodder for its TikTok competitor, YouTube Shorts. Today, the company is announcing the launch of “Green Screen,” a tool that will allow users to use up to a 60-second video segment from any eligible YouTube video or YouTube Short as the
Mobile penetration in Africa is growing impressively at about 46% as more people come online for the very first time. In turn, this has increased the market opportunity for startups, especially fintechs and e-commerce, which try to provide various solutions to meet the financial needs of the populace. But to do that, these businesses must