If viral TikTok songs like Dr. Dog’s “Where’d All the Time Go?” or Bo Burnham’s “Bezos I” weren’t already stuck in your head on loop, now they could be. Today SiriusXM launched a TikTok Radio channel, which features TikTok creators as channel hosts. The station is designed to sound like a “radio version of the
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Rutter, a remote-first company, is developing a unified e-commerce API that enables companies to connect with data across any platform. On Friday the company announced it was emerging from stealth with $1.5 million in funding from a group of investors including Haystack, Liquid 2 and Basis Set Ventures. Founders Eric Yu and Peter Zhou met
Tabletop gaming is in the middle of a historic boom, despite recent restrictions imposed on in-person gatherings by COVID. The tools adopted by game masters and casual players to play remotely are powerful but not always the easiest to use or adopt. Role hopes to change that with a super-accessible video platform focused on the
Facebook is launching a new program in India to help small and medium-sized businesses secure loans in the South Asian market as the company makes further push to expand its presence among merchants. The social conglomerate said its new program, called Small Business Loans Initiative, addresses some of the biggest pain points small businesses face
Breef raised $3.5 million in funding to continue developing what it boasts as “the world’s first online marketplace” for transactions between brands and agencies. Greycroft led the round and was joined by Rackhouse Ventures, The House Fund, John and Helen McBain, Lance Armstrong and 640 Oxford Ventures. Including the new round, the New York and
As one of four general partners at Andreessen Horowitz who are now investing the venture firm’s third crypto fund, a $2.2 billion vehicle, Arianna Simpson is very focused on how to return that capital and much more to the firm’s limited partners. Toward that end, she has been more focused of late on startups that
Choosing an insurance policy is one of the most complicated financial decisions a person can make. Jakarta-based Lifepal wants to simplify the process for Indonesians with a marketplace that lets users compare policies from more than 50 providers, get help from licensed agents and file claims. The startup, which says it is the country’s largest
Daniel Liss Contributor Daniel Liss is the founder and CEO of Dispo, the digital disposable camera social network. Facebook is a monopoly. Right? Mark Zuckerberg appeared on national TV today to make a “special announcement.” The timing could not be more curious: Today is the day Lina Khan’s FTC refiled its case to dismantle Facebook’s monopoly.
Asaf Cohen Contributor The Pareto principle, also known as the 80-20 rule, asserts that 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes, rendering the remainder way less impactful. Those working with data may have heard a different rendition of the 80-20 rule: A data scientist spends 80% of their time at work cleaning up messy
Todd Graham Contributor Todd Graham is vice president at Venrock, a pioneering venture capital firm established in 1969. Wash, rinse, repeat: A startup is founded, first product ships, customers engage, and then a larger company’s corporate development team sends a blind email requesting to “connect and compare notes.” If you’re a venture-backed startup, it would
Adobe announced today it is acquiring Frame.io, a video review and collaboration platform used by over a million customers, for $1.275 billion in cash. Founded in 2014 by post-production company owner Emery Wells and technologist John Traver, New York-based Frame.io was created to solve the workflows challenges filmmakers faced in their daily lives. Today, the
Have you ever tried to share a funny tweet with a few friends via Twitter DM, only to accidentally start a group chat? You’re not alone. Today, Twitter announced that it will roll out a few quality of life improvements to its direct messaging system over the next few weeks, including the ability to DM
UIPath came seemingly out of nowhere in the last several years, going public last year in a successful IPO during which it raised over $527 million. It raised $2 billion in private money prior to that with its final private valuation coming in at an amazing $35 billion. UIPath CEO Daniel Dines will be joining
Fintech startup Revolut is launching a new feature called Payday. It is an alternative to credit card debt and short-term credit as it lets you unlock a portion of your wage early. If a business decides to integrate with Revolut, users can then access the feature from the financial super app directly. Right now, the
Open-source business intelligence company Metabase announced Thursday a $30 million Series B round led by Insight Partners. Existing investors Expa and NEA joined in on the round, which gives the San Francisco-based company a total of $42.5 million in funding since it was founded in 2015. Metabase previously raised $8 million in Series A funding
Just five months after raising $90M, Brazil’s Nuvemshop announced today it has raised $500 million in a round co-led by Insight Partners and Tiger Global Management. The financing values Nuvemshop – which some say is Latin America’s answer to Shopify – at $3.1 billion and brings the Sao Paulo-based startup’s total funding in the last
Consumer shift to buying online during the global pandemic — and keeping that habit — continues to boost revenue for makers of developer tools that help e-commerce sites provide better shopping experiences. LA-based Nacelle is one of the e-commerce infrastructure companies continuing to attract investor attention, and at a speedy clip, too. It closed on
The push for renewable energy has brought offshore wind power to the forefront of many an energy company’s agenda, and that means taking a very close look at the ocean floor where the installations are to go. Fortunately Bedrock is here to drag that mapping process into the 21st century with its autonomous underwater vehicle
Sophie Alcorn Contributor Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives. More posts by this contributor Dear Sophie: Can I hire an
Welcome back to The Exchange. Today we’re doing something fun with crypto. Sure, we could write more about how insurtech valuations are under fresh pressure after Hippo’s Q2 earnings report — we spoke to the company’s president yesterday; more to come — or the latest stock market movements in China. There are big rounds worth
Facebook is out with a new report collecting the most popular posts on the platform, responding to critics who believe the company is deliberately opaque about its top performing content. Facebook’s new “widely viewed content reports” will come out quarterly, reflecting most viewed top News Feed posts in the U.S. every three months — not
Databricks, the open-source data lake and data management powerhouse has been on quite a financial run lately. Today Bloomberg reported the company could be raising a new round worth at least $1.5 billion at an otherworldly $38 billion valuation. That price tag is up $10 billion from its last fundraise in February when it snagged
Patrick Frank Contributor Patrick Frank is the co-founder and COO of PatientPartner, a platform that connects pre-surgical patients with fully recovered patients who went through the same surgery. Frank has worked in consumer technology across industries including retail banking, law, real estate and healthcare. When you enter the health tech industry as a new startup,
One, a startup that aims to bring “all-in-one banking” to the middle class, announced today that it has raised $40 million in a Series B round of funding. Progressive Investment Company (the insurance giant’s investment arm) led the round, which included participation from Obvious Ventures, Foundation Capital, Core Innovation Capital and others. The financing brings
Twitter is rolling out changes its newly rebuilt API that will allow third-party developers to build tools and other solutions specifically for its audio chatroom product, Twitter Spaces. The company today announced it’s shipping new endpoints to support Spaces on the Twitter API v2, with the initial focus on enabling discovery of live or scheduled
Floods are devastating. They rip asunder communities, wipe out neighborhoods, force the evacuation of thousands of people every year and recovering from them can take years — assuming recovery is possible at all. The U.S. government estimates that floods in recent decades (exclusive of hurricanes and tropical storms) have caused an estimated $160 billion in
Accord opened up its previously announced $6 million seed round to accept over $1 million from a group of CEOs and sales leads at companies they are working with to officially launch its business-to-business sales platform. Brothers Ross and Ryan Rich co-founded the San Francisco-based company in 2019 with Wayne Pan to create a customer
It’s not even half a year since crypto exchange Bitpanda announced a $170M Series B — when, back in March, Austria’s first unicorn was being valued at $1.2 billion. Today it’s topping that: Announcing a $263M Series C, led by Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, with the fintech startup now valued at a whopping $4.1BN —
MobileCoin, a cryptocurrency business that counts founder Moxie Marlinspike of the encrypting messaging app Signal as its earliest technical advisor, has raised $66 million in Series B funding from a long list of investors, including Alameda Research, Berggruen Holdings, BlockTower Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures, Vy Capital, and earlier backers General Catalyst and
We sometimes take for granted that most anyone who wishes to become say, an Uber driver, can do so. But that assumption is a narrow view considering there are many people who would love to earn income in that way but can’t because of lack of car ownership (and all that goes with it) —