White Star Capital, better known as a VC which, in its time, has backed the likes of Digg, launchrock, Meero, Summly, and Tier, among others, is moving into the hot world of crypto and blockchain with a new $50M Digital Asset Fund. The special-vehicle fund will specialize in investing in crypto-networks and blockchain-enabled businesses and
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It’s hard enough to talk about your feelings to a person; Jo Aggarwal, the founder and CEO of Wysa, is hoping you’ll find it easier to confide in a robot. Or, put more specifically, “emotionally intelligent” artificial intelligence. Wysa is an A.I powered mental health app designed by Touchkin eServices, Aggarwal’s company that currently maintains
I am not a smart man. Earlier today I tweeted about $ASS, a cryptocurrency named after a dog. In this case, Australian Shepherds. And after doing that obviously stupid thing, my Twitter feed became chock-full of ass-related imagery, memes, and $ASS coin stans breathing on me. It’s all very annoying as I run Tweetdeck on
Snap wants users to get a more personal view of the world around them. While products like Google Maps and Apple Maps have long-relied on data partners to juice the quality of their contextual insights, Snap is hoping it can give users a more hands-on approach to mixing and matching third-party tie-ins to its Snap
Buzzy US startup Pipe — which claims to be the “Nasdaq for revenue” — has just raised $250 million at a $2 billion valuation? The secret for the hype? It gives SaaS companies a way to get their revenue upfront, by “pairing them with investors on a marketplace that pays a discounted rate for the
Yousuf Khan Contributor Yousuf Khan is a partner at Ridge Ventures. Prior to joining Ridge, he was the first CIO of Automation Anywhere, CIO and Vice President of Customer Success at cloud-based AI platform Moveworks, as well as CIO of Pure Storage, Qualys and Hult International Business School. More posts by this contributor Customer advisory
TaniHub Group, an Indonesian startup that helps farmers get better prices and more customers for their crops, has raised a $65.5 million Series B. The funding was led by MDI Ventures, the investment arm of Telkom Group, one of Indonesia’s largest telecoms, with participation from Add Ventures, BRI Ventures, Flourish Ventures, Intudo Ventures, Openspace Ventures,
Ethan Choi Contributor Ethan Choi is a partner at Accel, where he invests in SaaS companies that are redefining workflow and collaboration, enterprise automation and e-commerce infrastructure. He also focuses on consumer internet companies and online marketplaces. In 2016, more than 20 years after Amazon’s founding and 10 years since Shopify launched, it would have
We live in a world where companies have to send out ‘gifts’ to individuals. Chocolate bars. Bottles of wine. You name it. Companies are gifting it. But right now, that operation is buried in a marketing department on a spreadsheet, as is mostly pretty disorganized. A handful of startups realized it could be done better
For this morning’s edition of The Exchange, Alex Wilhelm studied information recently released by mobile gaming studio Jam City as it prepares to go public in a $1.2 billion blank-check deal with DPCM Capital. “Jam City is a bit like Zynga, but unless you are a mobile-gaming aficionado, you might not have heard of it,”
While it would be nice to write about something other than yet another tech company looking to list via a SPAC, the deals keep dropping, so our more traditional fare of covering startup trends will remain on hold for at least one day more. This morning, we’re looking at the Jam City deal to merge
With vaccination rates slowing in the U.S., the White House is getting creative about getting shots in arms. Beyond protecting yourself and others from from a deadly disease, the latest incentive to get vaccinated could help you find love (or get laid). The White House COVID-19 response team announced Friday that a number of popular
Britive, an early stage startup that is trying to bring privileged access control to a multi-cloud world, announced a $10 million Series A this morning. Crosslink Capital led the investment with participation from previous investors Upfront Ventures and One Way Ventures. The company helps automate permissioning across multiple cloud vendors and software services, whether that
BuffaloGrid, a startup that provides phone charging and digital content to people in off-grid environments, is teaming up with the Techfugees refugee non-profit to provid free educational content and device charging to displaced people across East Africa and the Middle-East. The initial service will see solar-powered ‘BuffaloGrid Hubs’ deployed in refugee camps across Kenya and
May.19 — Cathie Wood, chief executive officer and chief investment officer at Ark Investment Management, says Bitcoin is “on sale” right now, although it is not necessarily at a bottom. She speaks with Bloomberg’s Carol Massar at The Bloomberg Businessweek event.
Melbourne O’Banion Contributor Melbourne O’Banion is co-founder and CEO of digital life insurance company Bestow. An estimated 41 million Americans say they need life insurance but have yet to purchase coverage. Despite this awareness among consumers, the Life Insurance Marketing and Research Association estimates a $12 trillion coverage gap, with about 50% of millennials planning
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week was good fun not only because we had the whole team together to record, but also because we are still basking in the endless glory of our winning a Webby earlier this week. Frankly we are still
The Indian government has expressed strong objection to Twitter for classifying certain tweets by Indian politicians as “manipulated media,” according to a notice leaked to journalists Friday. The notice comes two days after Twitter labeled a tweet from Sambit Patra, the spokesperson of India’s ruling party BJP, as “manipulated media.” In the tweet, Patra had
The podcasting world remains one of the most vibrant formats in media (and I am not just saying that since the Equity crew won a Webby yesterday for our not-that-humble podcast). Its openness, diversity, freedom, and ease-of-authoring has broadened the medium to all sorts of hosts on every subject imaginable. We experience that dynamism and
European Union lawmakers are facing further pressure to step in and do something about lackadaisical enforcement of the bloc’s flagship data protection regime after the European Parliament voted yesterday to back a call urging the Commission to start an infringement proceeding against Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) for not “properly enforcing” the regulation. The Commission
Snap yesterday announced the latest iteration of its Spectacles augmented reality glasses, and today the company revealed a bit more news: it is also acquiring the startup that supplied the technology that helps power them. The Snapchat parent is snapping up WaveOptics, an AR startup that makes the waveguides and projectors used in AR glasses.
GPS is one of those science fiction technologies whose use is effortless for the end user and endlessly challenging for the engineers who design it. It’s now at the heart of modern life: everything from Amazon package deliveries to our cars and trucks to our walks through national parks are centered around a pin on
Vietnam has one of the fastest-growing e-commerce markets in Southeast Asia, but many major platforms still focus on large cities. This means people in smaller cities or rural areas need to deal with longer wait times for deliveries. Social commerce company Mio is taking advantage of that gap by building a reseller network and logistics
Farmers and food businesses, like restaurants, deal with the same issue: a fragmented supply chain. Secai Marche wants to streamline agricultural logistics, making fulfillment more cost-efficient and enabling food businesses to bundle products from different farmers into the same order. The company is headquartered in Japan, with operations in Malaysia, and plans to expand into
At Snap’s Partner Summit, the company announced a number of updates to the company’s developer tools and AR-focused Lens Studio, including several focused on bringing shopping deeper into the Snapchat experience. One of the cooler updates involved the company’s computer vision Scan product, which analyzes content in a user’s camera feed to quickly bring up
Patrik Liu Tran Contributor Patrik Liu Tran is the co-founder and CEO of Validio, an automated real-time data validation and quality monitoring platform. He holds a Ph.D. in Business Administration (as well as an M.Sc. and B.Sc.) from Stockholm School of Economics, and a Civil Engineering degree in Engineering Physics with an M.Sc. in AI
Consumers are moving into investing to complement — or in some cases, offset — less good returns from things like traditional savings accounts with low interest rates or pensions, and today one of the bigger “neo-brokers” in Europe helping to open up that opportunity is announcing a monster round of funding to fuel its growth.
During Snap Partner Summit, Snap announced a brand new app focused on creators. Named Story Studio, this standalone iOS app gives you several editing tools so that you can make your content look as professional as possible. Story editing tools are still in Snapchat — nothing is changing on this front. But if you’ve been
Telemedicine, in its original form of the phone call, has been around for decades. For people in remote or rural areas without easy access to in-person care, consulting a doctor over the phone has often been the go-to approach. But for a large swath of the world used to taking half a day off work
Renovating a home is an exciting, yet often fraught-filled, endeavor. One startup that aims to help make the process simpler, cheaper and less stressful by helping people manage the home renovation process has raised $6 million to help it grow even faster. Builders VC led the round, which included participation from Celtic, Newfund and Wish co-founder Danny