Bright Machines is going public via a SPAC-led combination, it announced this morning. The transaction will see the 3-year-old company merge with SCVX, raising gross cash proceeds of $435 million in the process. After the transaction is consummated, the startup will sport an anticipated equity valuation of $1.6 billion. The Bright Machines news indicates that
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Every branch of science is increasingly reliant on big data sets and analysis, which means a growing confusion of formats and platforms — more than inconvenient, this can hinder the process of peer review and replication of research. Code Ocean hopes to make it easier for scientists to collaborate by making a flexible, shareable format
Buzzy face-swapping video app Reface is expanding its reality-shifting potential beyond selfies by letting users upload more of their own content for its AI to bring to life. Users of its iOS and Android apps still can’t upload their own user generated video but the latest feature — which it calls Swap Animation — lets
Merge, a startup that helps its users build customer-facing integrations with third-party tools, today announced that it has raised a $4.5 million seed round led by NEA. Additional angel investors include former MuleSoft CEO Greg Schott, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, Expanse co-founders Tim Junio and Matt Kraning, and Jumpstart CEO Ben Herman. Launched in 2020,
French startup Ankorstore has raised a $102 million Series B funding round (€84 million). Tiger Global and Bain Capital Ventures are leading today’s funding round with existing investors Index Ventures, GFC, Alven and Aglaé also participating. This is a significant funding round as it comes just a few months after the company raised €25 million.
Apple has announced that it is adding some new features to its music streaming service Apple Music. Starting next month, users will find some new options, such as spatial audio with support for Dolby Atmos as well as lossless audio files. Spotify recently announced a new high-end subscription tier with CD-quality, lossless audio files. But Spotify
As a longtime real estate developer based in Chile, Benjamin Labra was able to spot gaps in the buying and renting markets in Latin America. To meet demands, he started Houm, an all-in-one platform that helps homeowners rent and sell their properties in the region. Fresh out of Y Combinator’s W21 cohort, today Houm announced
Ride-hailing giant Gojek and marketplace Tokopedia, Indonesia’s two biggest startups, said on Monday they have combined their businesses to form GoTo Group, the largest technology group in the Southeast Asian nation, the fourth most populous country that is currently navigating to contain the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. GoTo will be preparing for a
Voice social network Clubhouse said on Sunday it will expand its Android app worldwide in a week, days after launching a beta version of its service on Google-owned mobile operating system for users in the U.S. The startup — backed by A16z, Tiger Global and DST Global and valued at about $4 billion — said it will
Monica Long Contributor As the price of bitcoin hits record highs and cryptocurrencies become increasingly mainstream, the industry’s expanding carbon footprint becomes harder to ignore. Just last week, Elon Musk announced that Tesla is suspending vehicle purchases using bitcoin due to the environmental impact of fossil fuels used in bitcoin mining. We applaud this decision,
May.06 — Dario Gil, senior vice president and director at International Business Machines Corp, introduces their 2 nanometer chip, which is the world’s smallest and first chip of that size. He explains how the new IBM chip will perform better than the existing technology and says it will be used in consumer products by late
Dominik Angerer Contributor Dominik Angerer is CEO and co-founder of headless CMS Storyblok, which provides best practice guidance for startups on how to build a sustainable approach to marketing their content. Search engine optimization, PR, paid marketing, emails, social — marketing and communications is crowded with techniques, channels, solutions and acronyms. It’s little wonder that
When you’re head-down and nose to the grindstone — I’m looking at all you hard-working early-stage startup founders — it’s easy to miss a deadline for an outstanding opportunity. Case in point: competing in Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 in September. We want every game-changing, innovative startup — from anywhere around the world —
Mike Ghaffary Contributor Mike Ghaffary is a general partner at Canvas Ventures, where he invests in innovation for consumers and software. Previously, he was a partner at Social Capital, co-founder and VP of Business Development of Stitcher, VP of Business and Corporate Development at Yelp, and Director of Business Development at TrialPay. More posts by
When eventually they become a working reality, Quantum computers won’t be of much value if they simply sit there on their own. Just like the internet, the value is in the network. But right now there’s scant technology to link these powerful devices together. That’s where QphoX comes in. Thus Dutch startup has raised €2
No matter what slice of the mobility market you’ve claimed as your own — AVs, EVs, data mining, AI, dockless scooters, robotics or the batteries that will charge and change the world — you won’t find a better place to showcase your extraordinary tech and talent than TC Sessions: Mobility 2021. Buy a Startup Exhibitor
Low code and no code tools abound these days, as the industry attempts to give non-technical end users the ability to create applications without code (or very little anyway). Salesforce has been a big proponent of this approach to help reduce the complexity of working on its platform, and today the CRM giant announced a
Mark Minevich Contributor Mark Minevich is president of Going Global Ventures, an adviser at Boston Consulting Group, a digital fellow at IPsoft and a leading global AI expert and digital cognitive strategist and venture capitalist. More posts by this contributor Using AI responsibly to fight the coronavirus pandemic The American AI Initiative: A good first
Before Twilio had a market cap approaching $56 billion and more than 200,000 customers, the cloud-communications platform developed a secret sauce to fuel its growth: a developer-focused model that dispensed with traditional marketing rules. Software companies that sell directly to end users share a simple framework for managing growth that leverages discoverability, desirability and do-ability
After years in the backwaters of venture capital, edtech had a booming 2020. Not only did its products become must-haves after schools around the globe went remote, but investors also poured capital into leading projects. There was even some exit activity, with well-known edtech players like Coursera going public earlier this year. But despite a
For Bill Staples, the freshly appointed CEO at New Relic, who takes over on July 1, yesterday was a good day. After more than 20 years in the industry, he was given his own company to run. It’s quite an accomplishment, but now the hard work begins. Lew Cirne, New Relic’s founder and CEO, who
Mental health has been put into the spotlight in a big way in recent times. For many of us, our lives and lifestyles have changed massively in the last year, and alongside that, we’re collectively facing pandemic-fueled mortality on a global scale in a way that hasn’t existed for generations, a perfect storm of sorts
Adam LaGreca Contributor Adam LaGreca is the founder of 10KMedia and previously led communications for DigitalOcean, Datadog and Gremlin. More posts by this contributor Dear Google, the future is fewer people writing code There’s a lot of noise out there. The ability to effectively communicate can make or break your launch. It will play a
On the heels of a $600 million fundraise earlier this year, payments giant Stripe has been on an acquisition march to continue building out its business. In the latest development, the company has acquired Bouncer, a startup based in Oakland that has built a platform to automatically run card authentications and detect fraud in card-based
Cisco has been busy on the acquisition front this week, and today the company announced it was buying threat assessment platform Kenna Security, the third company it has purchased this week. The two companies did not disclose the purchase price. With Kenna, Cisco gets a startup that uses machine learning to sort through the massive
Facebook has failed in its bid to prevent its lead EU data protection regulator from pushing ahead with a decision on whether to order suspension of its EU-US data flows. The Irish High Court has just issued a ruling dismissing the company’s challenge to the Irish Data Protection Commission’s (DPC) procedures. The case has huge
One. That’s the number of African tech companies that have gone public on the NYSE in the last 10 years. Two, if you’re counting local exchanges. The former is African-focused e-commerce company Jumia and the latter is Egyptian fintech company Fawry. As a tech company, Fawry’s listing on the Egyptian Stock Exchange is a rarity.
Upsie, a consumer warranty startup, has raised $18.2 million in a Series A round led by True Ventures. The financing brings the total raised for the St. Paul, Minnesota-based startup to $25 million since its 2015 inception. A large group of investors participated in the round, including Concrete Rose VC, Avanta Ventures, Kapor Capital, Samsung
BluBracket, an early stage startup that focuses on keeping source code repositories secure, even in distributed environments, announced a $12 million Series A today. Evolution Equity Partners led the round with help from existing investors Unusual Ventures, Point72 Ventures, SignalFire and Firebolt Ventures. When combined with the $6.5 million seed round we reported on last
Google has been fined just over €100 million (~$123M) by Italy’s antitrust watchdog for abuse of a dominant market position. The case relates to Android Auto, a modified version of Google’s mobile OS intended for in-car use, and specifically to how Google restricted access to the platform to an electric car charging app, called JuicePass,