Rhys Spence Contributor Rhys Spence is head of research at Brighteye Ventures, a European edtech-focused fund, where he works with portfolio companies to help address priorities, with a focus on internationalization and HR. More posts by this contributor The unbundling of professional learning and entrepreneurship education What we can learn from edtech startups’ expansion efforts
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bloss is a UK startup that connects would-be or existing parents to pre-vetted parenting experts. It has now raised £1million in a pre-seed round led by Antler, the early-stage VC and is also backed by angels including Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Narry Singh, footballer Andriy Shevchenko and British-Jamaican entrepreneur, Alexandra Chong. The funds will be used
New data from Kruze Consulting shows just how much the venture capital fundraising market has changed for startups in the last few quarters. Kruze, which provides accounting, tax and venture capital-related services to private tech companies, has access to hard data regarding startup performance. Healy Jones, vice president of financial planning and analysis at Kruze
A growing number of U.S. consumers are getting scammed on social media according to a new report by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which revealed that consumers lost $770 million to social media scams in 2021 — a figure that accounted for about one-fourth of all fraud losses for the year. That number has also
Sidharth Kakkar knows all about the pain of relying on a giant spreadsheet. While building his previous company, Freckle Education, it got to the point where the master spreadsheet full of data that everyone was using would not load anymore or would crash the computer. His company eventually was bought, but that pain point stuck
With post-pandemic burnout on the rise, the shift to remote working, and the ‘Great Resignation’ now passing into the lexicon, companies are struggling to hold onto talent. Culture platforms like Culture Amp and Glint were built for a different era, offering insights and reports to HR, but many are less tailored to 2022. And employee
Applying to colleges is one of the hardest parts of high school, especially for students who want to study abroad. Cialfo wants to make the process easier, with a platform that includes school research, communication tools for counselors and students, and Direct Apply, which helps international students find and apply to hundreds of programs with
Berlin-based Mayd, a startup that’s building an on-demand medicine delivery platform in Europe, has fast followed a chunky seed raise last fall — with a €30 million (~$34M) Series A funding round led by US investor Lightspeed Venture Partners. Previous investors Target Global, 468 Capital and Earlybird Venture Capital also chipped into the Series A.
Reddit is testing a feature that would allow its users to set any NFT they own as their profile picture — not only its own Ethereum-based NFTs, called “CryptoSnoos,” released in limited quantities last year. A similar feature allowing users to set their NFTs as profile pictures recently launched on Twitter, where the photos themselves
South Korea’s electric vehicle battery maker LG Energy Solution made a successful market debut on Thursday. The market capitalization of LG Energy stood at $98.3 billion (118 trillion KRW) at the close of trading on local stock exchanges, making it the country’s second valuable firm after Samsung Electronics. The firm’s stock price opened at 597,000
The creative community has been a ripe target for startups building tools and services to serve their interests and needs as they transition from their traditionally offline practices into a digital present and future. In one of the latest developments, Domestika — a popular site that creates and sells online video tutorials and courses covering
Gaming has been one of the most popular entertainment categories in the last two years of pandemic living. Now, a gaming startup that’s building a new kind of platform that it thinks will be a — wait for it — game changer in the category is announcing some funding as to ride that wave of
Banking giant UBS announced earlier today that it will purchase venture-backed robo-advisor Wealthfront in an all-cash transaction worth $1.4 billion. Wealthfront, which raised just north of $200 million while private, per Crunchbase data, is one of a few wealth management services that grew on the back of offering automatic investing tools to consumers. Betterment ($435
Black Sheep Foods, a food tech company making plant-based heritage breed meats and wild game, took in $5.25 million in seed funding as it continues developing its patent-pending flavor compounds. Sunny Kumar, co-founder, told TechCrunch that where some plant-based meats fall short is relying on the taste to be generated by the mouth. Rather, his
Instagram is introducing a new profile banner that will display a user’s upcoming livestreams, the company announced on Wednesday. Instagram head Adam Mosseri detailed the new feature in a video published to his social media profiles and noted that users can now display a badge on their profile to let others know that they have a
With the catchy moniker Deep Decarbonization Frontier Fund, Energy Impact Partners has captured $200 million of commitments for its $350 million fund, doubling down on its commitments to transition the world toward a sustainable future. The fund targets early-stage technologies that accelerate the transition to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. The Frontier Fund is built on
With sales teams now operating remotely, it is even harder to monitor how well they are performing. Atrium wants to make sure sales managers, sales development managers and customer success leads have the data-driven insights to be able to do that. The sales management technology company closed on $20 million in Series A funding to
The pandemic spurred a boom in electric bikes and other alternative urban transportation modes as city dwellers looked for less-crowded ways to get around their streets quickly and easily without resorting to cars. Now, one of the companies that benefitted from that trend is announcing a big round of funding to expand its business. Cowboy,
Following a two-month delay, Valve’s Steam Deck will launch on February 25th. In a blog post the company published on Wednesday, Valve said it would open orders to the first batch of reservation holders that day. Those customers will have 72 hours to purchase the handheld. If they don’t use the opportunity, Valve will release
As the startup game has matured around the world, it’s become less fun. Building companies from nothing to something is hardly supposed to be laugh-a-minute, but I think we’ve lost sight of how much fun new tech used to be. An example that comes to mind is Meerkat. Let me explain: Back in 2015, Meerkat
You’ve got a hundred-million-dollar mission — why are you using software built in the ’90s to design and launch it? That’s the question being asked by many new space companies, and Epsilon3 is looking to help them bring their operations out of spreadsheets and Word docs and into a modern and collaborative work platform. We
As a result of its ongoing partnership with nonprofit and anti-sexual assault organization RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network), Tinder today announced a handful of product improvements as well as training for internal teams at the dating app maker designed to better support survivors of abuse and harassment. Soon, Tinder also says its members
Husk Power Systems, a clean energy company that has been at the forefront of fueling rural electrification since 2008, is planning to launch 500 solar mini-grids in Nigeria over the next five years. The renewable energy firm revealed the plans today when it announced the signing of a voluntary commitment with the United Nations to
Israeli startup Firebolt has been taking on Google’s BigQuery, Snowflake and others with a cloud data warehouse solution that it claims can run analytics on large datasets cheaper and faster than its competitors. Now, it is announcing a big round of funding to fuel its big data growth: Firebolt has raised $100 million in a
Pimloc, a UK computer vision startup that’s sharpened its business pitch to sell an AI service for quickly anonymizing video — automating the blurring of faces or licence plates, along with a suite of other visual search services — has grabbed another chunk of seed funding: Announcing a raise of $7.5M, led by Zetta Venture
Snapchat is upgrading its AR shopping experience today with updates to both to the Shopping Lenses inside its social app as well as to the analytics shared with Snap’s brand and retail partners. For consumers, the AR shopping features become more practical to use, as they’ll now display key product information, updated in real-time, like
OZÉ, a Ghanaian fintech startup that provides digital recordkeeping tools with embedded finance products to medium and small businesses, has raised a $3 million pre-Series A round. The startup’s new financing round was led by European early-stage VC Speedinvest, with participation from Cathay AfricInvest Innovation Fund, Savannah Capital and other unnamed angel investors. This news
A sari-sari store owner who uses GrowSari GrowSari, the Manila-based startup that helps small shops grow and digitize, announced today that KKR will lead its Series C round with a $45 million investment. The funds will be used to enter new regions in the Philippines and expand its financial products. The Series C round is
Quantum computing promises to unlock a new wave of processing power for the most complex calculations, but that could prove to be just as harmful as it is helpful: security specialists warn that malicious hackers will be able to use quantum machines to break through today’s standards in cryptography and encryption. Today, a startup called
French startup Resilience announced yesterday that it has raised a $45 million (€40 million) Series A round led by Cathay Innovation. The startup wants to improve the treatment journey when you’re diagnosed with cancer so that you live a healthier and longer life. In addition to Cathay Innovation, existing investor Singular is also participating. Other