This morning Metafy, a distributed startup building a marketplace to match gamers with instructors, announced that it has closed an additional $5.5 million to its $3.15 million seed round. Call it a seed-2, seed-extension or merely a baby Series A; Forerunner Ventures, DCM and Seven Seven Six led the round as a trio. Metafy’s model
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If you ask Nik Bonaddio why he wanted to build a new mobile trivia app, his answer is simple. “In my life, I’ve got very few true passions: I love trivia and I love sports,” Bonaddio told me. “I’ve already started a sports company, so I’ve got to start a trivia company.” He isn’t kidding
Activist investor Starboard Value is clearly. fed up with Box and it let the cloud content management know it in no uncertain terms in a letter published yesterday. The firm, which bought a 7.7% stake in Box two years ago claims the company is underperforming, executing poorly and making bad business decisions — and it
Inspired by his own problems with skin ailments, tech founder Daniel Jensen decided there had to be a better way. So, using an in-house tech platform, his Copenhagen-based startup Nøie developed its own database of skin profiles, to better care for sensitive skin. Nøie has now raised $12m in a Series A funding round led
AI is fundamental to many products and services today, but its hunger for data and computing cycles is bottomless. Lightmatter plans to leapfrog Moore’s law with its ultra-fast photonic chips specialized for AI work, and with a new $80M round the company is poised to take its light-powered computing to market. We first covered Lightmatter
Months after Apple’s App Store introduced privacy labels for apps, Google announced its own mobile app marketplace, Google Play, will follow suit. The company today pre-announced its plans to introduce a new “safety” section in Google Play, rolling out next year, which will require app developers to share what sort of data their apps collect,
Tech investments in emerging markets have been in full swing over the past couple of years and their ecosystems have thrived as a result. Some of these markets like Africa, Latin America, and India, have comprehensive reports by publications and firms on trends and investments in their individual regions. But there’s hardly a report to
Matt Johnson Contributor Matt Johnson is CEO and co-founder of QC Ware, a quantum computing software company. Matt was a managing director in private equity at Apollo Management and prior to that was a managing director in principal investing at Credit Suisse. The number of SPACs in the deep tech sector was skyrocketing, but a
Twitter just made a change to the way it displays images that has visual artists on the social network celebrating. In March, Twitter rolled out a limited test of uncropped, larger images in users’ feeds. Now, it’s declared those tests a success and improved the image sharing experience for everybody. On Twitter for Android or
While insurance providers continue to get disrupted by startups like Lemonade, Alan, Clearcover, Pie and many others applying tech to rethink how to build a business around helping people and companies mitigate against risks with some financial security, one issue that has not disappeared is fraud. Today, a startup out of France is announcing some
If the pandemic has been good for anything it’s been good for the therapy business and for startups targeting mental health, with VCs kept very busy signing checks. To wit, here’s another one: Madrid-based ifeel has bagged €5.5 million (~$6.6M) in Series A funding, led by Nauta Capital. The startup was founded back in 2017
Chime can apparently call itself the “fastest-growing fintech in the U.S.,” but it has agreed to stop referring to itself as a “bank,” per a new report out of American Banker. Evidently, the eight-year-old, San Francisco-based outfit was the target of an investigation by the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation after Chime used
Una Brands’ co-founders (from left to right): Tobias Heusch, Kiran Tanna and Kushal Patel One of the biggest funding trends of the past year is companies that consolidate small e-commerce brands. Many of the most notable startups in the space, like Thrasio, Berlin Brands Group and Branded Group, focus on consolidating Amazon Marketplace sellers. But
Facebook’s controversial policy-setting supergroup issued its verdict on Trump’s fate Wednesday, and it wasn’t quite what most of us were expecting. We’ll dig into the decision to tease out what it really means, not just for Trump, but also for Facebook’s broader experiment in outsourcing difficult content moderation decisions and for just how independent the
Timescale, makers of the open source TimescaleDB time series database, announced a $40 million Series B financing round today. The investment comes just over two years after it got a $15 million Series A. Redpoint Ventures led today’s round with help from existing investors Benchmark, New Enterprise Associates, Icon Ventures and Two Sigma Ventures. The
Metacore, a Finnish mobile games company, seems to have an amazing “relationship” with Supercell, another (quite successful) Finnish mobile games company. Back in September 2020, Metacore raised $17.7 million in equity from Supercell and another $11.8 million line of credit, sometimes also called a debt round. That amazing relationship appears to be ongoing. Because Metacore
Text Blaze, which was a part of the recent Winter 2021 Y Combinator accelerator batch, announced that it has closed a $3.3 million seed round. The company’s investment was led by Two Sigma Ventures’s Villi Iltchev and Susa Ventures’s Leo Polovets. The company’s product hybridizes two trends that TechCrunch has been tracking in recent years,
People have been discussing the importance of expanding opportunities for women in venture capital and startup entrepreneurship for decades. And for some time it appeared that progress was being made in building a more diverse and equitable environment. The prospect of more women writing checks was viewed as a positive for female founders, a cohort
Facebook is launching a new section of its app designed to connect neighbors and curate neighborhood-level news. The new feature, predictably called Neighborhoods, is available now in Canada and will be rolling out soon for U.S. users to test. As we reported previously, Neighborhoods has technically been around since at least October of last year,
Each of the big cloud platforms has its own methodology for passing on security information to logging and security platforms, leaving it to the vendors to find proprietary ways to translate that into a format that works for their tool. The Cloud Security Notification Framework (CSNF), a new working group that includes Microsoft, Google and
It was way back in 2018 that Omni:us appeared to disrupt the insurance market by applying AI to this most legacy of all industries. It has now gone on to raise $44.1 million. In a similar vein, Shift Technology in France has raised $100 million. Now a UK startup aims to do something similar, but
Flextock, one of the 10 African startups from the recent Y Combinator winter batch, has bagged an impressive pre-seed round just two months after graduation. The five-month-old company, which helps consumers and businesses manage e-commerce and fulfillment operations — from warehousing and logistics to delivery and cash collection — has closed a $3.25 million pre-seed
More money for the edtech boom: Munich-based StudySmarter, which makes digital tools to help learners of all ages swat up — styling itself as a ‘lifelong learning platform’ — has closed a $15 million Series A. The round is led by sector-focused VC fund, Owl Ventures. New York-based Left Lane Capital is co-investing, along with
With cybercrime on course to be a $6 trillion problem this year, organizations are throwing ever more resources at the issue to avoid being a target. Now, a startup that’s built a platform to help them stress-test the investments that they have made into their security IT is announcing some funding on the back of
Disqus, a commenting plugin that’s used by a number of news websites and which can share user data for ad targeting purposes, has got into hot water in Norway for tracking users without their consent. The local data protection agency said today it has notified the U.S.-based company of an intent to fine it €2.5
Halfway through my Monday afternoon workout last week, I got a message from a security researcher with a screenshot of my Peloton account data. My Peloton profile is set to private and my friend’s list is deliberately zero, so nobody can view my profile, age, city, or workout history. But a bug allowed anyone to
Africa is the last frontier for basically anything. Mobile gaming is no exception. For a continent that is home to more than 1 billion millennials and Gen Zers, mobile gaming has never really picked up, despite the continent witnessing rapid economic growth and smartphone adoption. Two issues have proved detrimental to this growth: distribution and
It’s only been three years since they hit the streets and Revel’s blue electric mopeds have already become a common sight in New York, San Francisco and a growing number of U.S. cities. However, Revel founder and CEO Frank Reig has set his sights far beyond building a shared moped service. In fact, since the
Earlier today recent dog-parent Alex Konrad and fellow Forbes staffer Eliza Haverstock broke the news that Divvy, a Utah-based corporate spend unicorn, is considering selling itself to Bill.com for a price that could top $2 billion. For the fintech sector, it’s big news. Corporate spend startups including Ramp and Brex are raising rapid-fired rounds at
Facebook unceremoniously confiscated Trump’s biggest social media megaphone months ago, but the former president might be poised to snatch it back. Facebook’s Oversight Board, an external Supreme Court-like policy decision making group, will either restore Trump’s Facebook privileges or banish him forever on Wednesday. Whatever happens, it’s a huge moment for Facebook’s nascent experiment in