Small businesses in the U.S. now have a new way to source home and lifestyle goods from new manufacturers. Bzaar, a business-to-business cross-border marketplace, is connecting retailers with over 50 export-ready manufacturers in India. The U.S.-based company announced Monday that it raised $4 million in seed funding, led by Canaan Partners, and including angel investors
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Facebook’s lead privacy regulator in Europe has raised concerns about a pair of ‘smart’ Ray-Ban sunglasses the tech giant is now selling. The glasses include a face-mounted camera which can be used to take pictures and short videos with a verbal cue. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) said Friday that it’s asked the tech giant
Weeks after Amazon introduced an updated Fire TV lineup that included, for the first time, its own TVs, Roku today is announcing its own competitive products in a race to capture consumers’ attention before the holiday shopping season. Its updates include a new Roku Streaming Stick 4K and Roku Streaming Stick 4K+ — the latter
Facetune developer Lightricks, which operates over a dozen subscription-based photo and video editing apps across iOS and Android, now has $130 million in new funding to further grow its business. The company’s newly announced Series D round includes $100 million in primary and $30 million in secondary funding, and now values the company at $1.8
Meet Xata, a startup with a new take on managed databases. The company runs your database for you and turns it into an API so that you can query and update it from your serverless app. Xata has raised a $5 million funding round. Its product is not yet ready for prime time but the
Taha Ahmed and Rooshan Aziz left their jobs in strategy consulting and investment banking in London earlier this year in order to found a mobile-only education platform startup, Maqsad, in Pakistan, with a goal “to make education more accessible to 100 million Pakistani students.” Having grown up in Karachi, childhood friends Ahmed and Aziz are
More spacecraft will be sent to orbit this year than ever before in human history, and the number of satellite launches is only anticipated to increase through the rest of the decade. Under these crowded conditions, being able to maneuver satellites in space and deorbit them when they reach the end of their useful life
May.24 — Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier, says Richard Branson, the company founder and billionaire, will be on a test flight into space. On Saturday, the VSS Unity took a crew of two into space for the first time in more than two years. Colglazier spoke on “Bloomberg Markets: The Close.”
Instacart‘s chief financial officer Sagar Sanghvi has departed from the on-demand grocery delivery company after nearly six years and is returning to his investing roots. Specifically, Sanghvi has joined Accel as a partner focused on global growth-stage consumer and enterprise investments. Prior to becoming CFO of Instacart, Sanghvi served as the company’s vice president of
Byju’s said on Thursday it has acquired California-headquartered Tynker, a leading coding platform for K-12 students, the latest in a series of major purchases as the Indian edtech giant attempts to aggressively expand to international markets. The companies didn’t disclose the terms of the deal, but a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch that
Companies typically have to settle on strategies that align with their customers, employees, investors, and regulators. The more they know about how the other side will decide, the clearer their own strategies become. If regulators always prefer choice for consumers, then it is easy for a platform to allow multiple payment choices: Shopify allows multiple
Concreit, a company that wants to open real estate investing to a broader group of people, announced today that it has closed $6 million in a seed funding round led by Matrix Partners. Hyphen Capital also participated in the round, in addition to individual investors such as Betterment founder and CEO Jon Stein; Andy Liu,
Sorcero announced Thursday a $10 million Series A round of funding to continue scaling its medical and technical language intelligence platform. The latest funding round comes as the company, headquartered in Washington, D.C. and Cambridge, Massachusetts, sees increased demand for its advanced analytics from life sciences and technical companies. Sorcero’s natural language processing platform makes
Gingko Bioworks, a synthetic biology company now valued at around $15 billion, begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange today. Gingko’s market debut is one of the largest in biotech history. It’s expected to raise about $1.6 billion for the company. It’s also one of the biggest SPAC deals done to date — Gingko
Self Financial, a fintech company that aims to help consumers build credit and savings at the same time, announced today it has raised $50 million in Series E funding. Altos Ventures led the financing, which also included participation from Meritech Capital and Conductive Ventures and brings the Austin-based startup’s total raised to $127 million since
Performance reviews eat up a lot of a manager’s time and are often the most dreaded part of work. OnLoop aims to bring some joy into the process by enabling information-gathering to happen behind the scenes and be easier for hybrid workforces. The Singapore-based company designed a mobile-first product that consistently gathers employee feedback and
Apple is planning to remove developer access to important user data as part of its iOS 15 release on Monday, leaving email marketers in a dilemma about how they will figure out metrics. To find out how the industry is approaching this problem, we spoke with Vivek Sharma, CEO of Movable Ink, a software consultancy
Mynd, a company that aims to make it easier for people to buy and manage single-family rental properties, announced today it has raised $57.3 million in funding from QED Investors. The financing values the Oakland, California-based company at $807 million, and brings the company’s total raised to $174.9 million since its 2016 inception. Invesco Real
Fiberplane, an Amsterdam-based early stage startup that is building collaborative notebooks for SREs (site reliability engineers) to collaborate around an incident in a similar manner to group editing in a Google Doc, announced a € 7.5M (approximately $8.8 million USD) seed round today. The round was co-led by Crane Venture Partners and Notion Capital with
“I’ve seen startups spend thousands of dollars inefficiently as a result of not having optimal signal in their paid acquisition campaigns. I’ve also spent millions at companies such as Postmates refining our signal to the best possible state,” says growth marketer Jonathan Martinez in a guest column for Extra Crunch this week. “I’d like every
Startups are raising record sums around the world, thanks to several contributing factors. As The Exchange explored yesterday, historically low interest rates have helped venture capitalists raise more capital than ever, to pick an example. Low rates have helped startups in another manner: As yields fell for certain assets, investors chased returns by betting on
Six months after securing a $23 million Series A round, Ketch, a startup providing online privacy regulation and data compliance, brought in an additional $20 million in A1 funding, this time led by Acrew Capital. Returning with Acrew for the second round are CRV, super{set} (the startup studio founded by Ketch’s co-founders CEO Tom Chavez
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. More posts by this contributor The 2021 edtech avalanche has just begun It’s a story common to all sectors today: investors only want to
Nick Costelloe Contributor Nick writes actionable growth marketing insights as head of content at Demand Curve. More posts by this contributor Demand Curve: 10 lies you’ve been told about marketing When people are uncertain, they look to others for behavioral guidance. This is called social proof, which is a physiological effect that influences your decisions
While the technology and business world worked towards the weekend, developer operations (DevOps) firm GitLab filed to go public. Before we get into our time off, we need to pause, digest the company’s S-1 filing, and come to some early conclusions. GitLab competes with GitHub, which Microsoft purchased for $7.5 billion back in 2018. The
Nagaraj Nadendla Contributor Nagaraj Nadendla is SVP of development at Oracle Cloud HCM, where he leads the development of cloud recruitment solutions including Oracle Recruiting and Taleo. Social media has served as a launchpad to success almost as long as it has been around. The stories of going viral from a self-produced YouTube video and
It’s been a heady 12-18 months for Zoom, the decade-old company that experienced monster 2020 growth and more recently, a mega acquisition with the $14.7 billion Five9 deal in July. That addition is part of a broader strategy the company has been undertaking the last couple of years to move beyond its core video conferencing
The EU will use legislation to push for greater resilience and sovereignty in regional semiconductor supply chains. The bloc’s president trailed a forthcoming ‘European Chips Act’ in a state of the union speech today. Ursula von der Leyen suggested that gaining greater autonomy in chipmaking is now a key component of the EU’s overarching digital
May.19 — With the semiconductor industry facing a global chip shortage, one company in the eye of the storm has been experiencing a meteoric rise: AMD. At the helm is engineer turned CEO Lisa Su, who transformed the company into a chip powerhouse. Shares are up 2240% under her tenure and AMD chips, short for
Major gains in online advertising have boosted valuations for adtech startups since the pandemic began, but one insider says investors are missing the party. “Adtech is having a moment,” writes industry veteran Casey Saran. “And while much of the oxygen has been soaked up by large legacy companies hitting the public market, there have been