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
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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
With supply chains in the automotive industry continuing to be disrupted due to Covid-19, demand has surged in the used-car market. Today, one of the startups that’s seeing a lot of growth as a result of that is announcing a big round of funding to further tap the opportunity. Cars24, a startup out of India
Hevo Data, a SaaS startup that is helping firms collate troves of data they generate and accumulate to make better use of them, has raised $30 million in a new financing round following a strong year of growth. Sequoia Capital India led the San Francisco and Bangalore-headquartered startup’s $30 million Series B round. A number
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. As we entered 2021, I wrote about the big question on every startup’s mind for 2021: How will a cataclysmic event such as a pandemic show up in post-pandemic innovation? Well, spoiler
A proliferation of ominous, non-specific TikTok rumors suggested that schools across the U.S. faced threats of violence on Friday, December 17. While a number of schools responded to the trend by closing their doors, many local law enforcement agencies and at least one federal one have weighed in, disclosing that the threat doesn’t appear to
As capital continues to flood the startup market, I keep thinking about the activation energy needed to not only start a company, but remain in charge of one. This type of scaling strategy looks more human than a check — after all, venture doesn’t fix all things — in fact, it can even complicate the
Foursquare’s heyday is long over, but the problem of finding cool local stuff to do lives on. Most people seem to make it work through a sometimes reluctant combination of Facebook or Instagram and word of mouth, but the reality is that there aren’t many good apps that help us get off of apps and
Re:cap, a non-dilutive funding platform in a similar vein to Pipe.com and Capchase but based in Europe, has closed a Seed financing round of $111.5 million, in a mix of growth capital and liquidity for the revenue-based financing platform. re:cap’s first product is now officially going live, following a pre-seed funding in May of this
Gen Z isn’t satisfied with the social media they grew up with, so they’re building the apps that they want to use. A “social branding” app for creative teens and twenty-somethings, Tagg is announcing a $2 million seed round today from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Facebook’s former VP of International Growth Ed Baker, TripAdvisor founder
Fees on the Nubank IPO were among the lowest of the year, Bloomberg revealed this week. Of the $2.6 billion the Brazilian fintech’s parent company, Nu Holdings, raised in the operation, only 1.6% are going to its underwriters, which included Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and others. “Among 490 IPOs in the U.S. so far
John Callery Contributor The debate around social media’s impact on mental health is hardly new, but the conversation has recaptured the world’s attention in light of reports this fall that suggest Facebook has been well aware of the toxic mental health consequences of its platforms for teens. While this data — and the knowledge that
Food waste is a $2.6 trillion problem globally as some 40% of food is wasted annually. Full Harvest believes this is a distribution problem that can be solved by digitizing the produce supply chain. The San Francisco-based company’s produce business-to-business marketplace provides a way for produce buyers and sellers to quickly close deals on surplus
With e-commerce becoming increasingly globalized, a company called Taxdoo, which builds API-based tools to help e-commerce companies with tax compliance and other accounting needs, is announcing a round of funding: $64 million, a Series B that the Hamburg-based startup will be using to expand further across Europe and to build what it describes as the
Paying bills is hardly a fun thing. So I think it’s safe to say that any technology that can make the process easier is welcome by all. Papaya is a Los Angeles-based startup with a mission to do just that. It has developed technology to give people a way to pay bills outside of traditional
The fees investment banks charge to underwrite IPOs can gobble several points from a public company’s gross proceeds, but new competition is giving some firms a chance to hold on to more of that sweet debut money. This week, Nubank paid just 1.6% of the $2.6 billion it raised to its underwriters. As Bloomberg reported,
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. To close out the year, Natasha and Mary Ann and Alex headed to the mic with Grace and Chris behind the scenes. We got to our favorite topics, and honestly, got a chance
TikTok is preparing to launch a new service that will turn its viral food videos into meals you can actually order and enjoy. The social app is partnering with Virtual Dining Concepts to launch “TikTok Kitchen”-branded delivery-only restaurants across the United States next year, as first reported by Bloomberg. The menu at the restaurants will
While there is plenty of technology out there to help make a building more sustainable, the ability to incorporate features into its design can be easier said than done. Enter cove.tool, a startup that wants to make sure buildings are sustainable by design from the moment of inception. The Atlanta-based startup, which has raised $30
As companies get employees back into offices, startups like New York-based foodtech company Fraîche aims to be the brand feature that welcomes them back. Today, the company, founded in 2019, announced $2 million in seed funding by backers that included La Boulange’s Pascal Rigo, Petrus Winery’s Jean Moueix, Bakerly’s Bruno and Julien Caron and the
The European Parliament has agreed its negotiating position on draft legislation to put limits on how Big Tech can operate with the aim of rebooting competition and fair dealing in digital markets. The proposal also takes aim at so-called ‘killer acquisitions’ where powerful platforms buy up smaller rivals or startups to choke off alternative services
Alitheia IDF (AIF), a women-focused private equity fund in Africa has raised $100 million to invest in gender-diverse businesses across the continent. The fund is looking to bridge the financing gap for women-led or owned businesses in Africa – where women startup founders are less likely to receive funding despite their increasing enterprise. Women-only founders
Capital may help someone take the jump into entrepreneurship, but what about the activation energy to let them think that big in the first place? To Cory Levy, the latter has always been more important. The entrepreneur behind First Text, a low-friction service that connects founders to investors, launched Z Fellows last year to test
Elementary, an artificial intelligence machine vision company, closed on $30 million in Series B funding to continue developing its manufacturing quality and inspection tools. We last profiled the Pasadena-based company last June when it raised $12.7 million in a financing round led by Threshold Ventures. Elementary’s tools enable customers to create no-code inspection routines and
Fuzey, a London-based company providing what it calls a “digital one-stop shop” for small businesses and independent contractors, raised $4.5 million in seed funding. The round was led by byFounders with participation from Flash Ventures, Global Founders Capital, Ascension and a group of angel investors, including Index Ventures’ venture partner Stephane Kurgan and Amplo VC
New research examining what happens after Internet users in Europe land on an ad-supported website and express their “privacy choices” — using a flagship ad industry consent management platform which is supposed to allow them to control the types of ads they receive (i.e. non-tracking vs “personalized”) — has raised fresh questions over the IAB
A digital mobile overdraft facility christened Fuliza, by Kenya’s biggest telco Safaricom Plc, is giving the country’s popular loan apps a run for their money barely three years after its launch. Fuliza allows Safaricom customers to access unsecured credit by overdrawing on M-Pesa – the telecommunication company mobile money wallet that allows its users to
Instant grocery — where urban-dwelling consumers buy food and other essentials and can get them delivered in 15 minutes or less — continues to be a big business, and one of the juggernauts in the space is now raising a big round of funding to meet that opportunity: Gopuff is in the process of raising
The Exchange joked earlier this week that Christmas had come early thanks to a particular SPAC deck providing us with some good fun. Ha. Little did we know what was coming. Social hub Reddit filed to go public, TechCrunch reports. You know what that means: It’s time to ask questions. The Exchange explores startups, markets and
In addition to announcing coming changes to its For You feed, TikTok today announced a handful of updates to its lineup of camera and editing tools, including new features for its popular Green Screen effect tool, as well as other updates to video enhancements and sound effects. Among the updates, one highlight is the update