Over the past two decades, the venture capital industry has exploded beyond anyone’s wildest imaginations. What began as a sleepy industry in Boston and Menlo Park has now expanded to dozens of cities the world over. The National Venture Capital Association estimates that VCs deployed more than $130 billion in 2018 and 2019, and thousands
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Facebook’s Collections, which allow users to organize content found on Facebook — like posts, photos, videos, and more — are now becoming more broadly shareable. The company says it’s currently testing a feature in the U.S. market that will allow Facebook users to share curated collections with friends, contributors, or even the public. Prior to
DroneBase, a Los Angeles-based provider of drone pilots for industrial services companies, has raised $7.5 million during the pandemic to double down on its work with renewable energy companies. While chief executive Dan Burton acknowledged that the company was fundraising prior to the pandemic, the industrial lockdown actually accelerated demand for the company’s services. Even
As an increasing number of daily and essential services move to digital platforms — a trend that’s had a massive fillip in the last few months — having efficient but effective ways to verify that people are who they say they are online is becoming ever more important. Now, a startup called Payfone, which has
Mapillary, the Swedish startup that wants to take on Google and others in mapping the world via a crowdsourced database of street-level imagery, has been acquired by Facebook, according to the company’s blog. Terms of deal aren’t being disclosed. The Mapillary team and project will become part of Facebook’s broader open mapping efforts. Mapillary also
Flipboard is giving news publishers and other curators on the platform a new way to highlight content through a format called Storyboards. Until now, Flipboard has largely focused on its Smart Magazines, which are ongoing collections that mix human and algorithmic curation, allowing readers to dive deeply into and keep up-to-date on a given topic. Storyboards,
Sep.05 — Markus Villig, Taxify’s chief executive officer, discusses the company’s business model with Bloomberg’s Caroline Hyde on “Bloomberg Technology.”
Michael Fraser Contributor Michael Fraser is an Air Force Veteran and co-founder of Refactr, a DevSecOps automation platform that helps tech teams modernize towards IT-as-code. Conduct an online search and you’ll find close to one million websites offering their own definition of DevSecOps. Why is it that domain experts and practitioners alike continue to iterate
DoorDash has confirmed that it is raising “approximately $400 million” in a Series H round of funding. Earlier today, Axios reported that the company was looking for roughly $400 million round at a post-money valuation of $16 billion. DoorDash clarified in a statement provided to TechCrunch that the valuation is slightly under the $16 billion
Twitter tries to make audio tweets a thing, the U.K. backtracks on its contact-tracing app and Apple’s App Store revenue share is at the center of a new controversy. Here’s your Daily Crunch for June 18, 2020. 1. Twitter begins rolling out audio tweets on iOS Twitter is rolling out audio tweets, which do exactly
Roger Duncan Contributor Roger Duncan is a former Research Fellow at the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin and the former General Manager of Austin Energy. He is the co-author of the upcoming book, “The Future of Buildings, Transportation and Power.” The economic lockdown resulting from the coronavirus pandemic has had an
Three years ago almost to the day, Intercom announced that it was bringing former Intuit exec Karen Peacock on board as COO. Today, she got promoted to CEO, effective July 1st. Current CEO and company co-founder Eoghan McCabe will become Chairman. As it turns out, these moves aren’t a coincidence. McCabe had been actively thinking
Meet Vivid, a new challenger bank launching in Germany that promises low fees and an integrated cashback program. The two co-founders Alexander Emeshev and Artem Yamanov previously worked as executives for Russian bank Tinkoff Bank. Vivid doesn’t try to reinvent the wheels and is building its product on top of well-established players. It relies on
The UK has given up building a centralized coronavirus contacts tracing app and will instead switch to a decentralized app architecture, the BBC has reported. This suggests its any future app will be capable of plugging into the joint ‘exposure notification’ API which has been developed in recent weeks by Apple and Google. The UK’s
In another up for technology shares, software companies saw their values reach new heights today. The days trading comes after a selloff last week eased some of technology companies’ rebounds from their COVID-19 lows; stocks in tech companies have more than made up for their early-year declines in mid-2020, with the Nasdaq reaching 10,000 points
Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com’s shares rose 5.7% after opening at HKD $239 (about USD $30.80) during their first day of trading on the Hong Kong stock exchange. JD.com had originally priced the shares for the secondary offering at $226. JD.com issued 133 million new Class A ordinary shares as part of the secondary offering and
Twitter is rolling out to its platform a new type of tweet — audio tweets — allowing users to share thoughts in audio form inside their feeds. The feature will only be available to some iOS users for now, though the company says all iOS users should have access “in the coming weeks.” No word
Scott Kinka Contributor Scott Kinka serves as CTO for Evolve IP. An award-winning, 20-year technology veteran with expertise in virtualization, cloud security and telecommunications, he designs the Evolve IP roadmap, leads its project team and works closely with customers and partners. Ryan Easter couldn’t believe he was being asked to run a pandemic business continuity
Hoxton Ventures, the London-based early-stage VC firm best known for backing British unicorns Babylon Health, Darktrace and Deliveroo, is announcing its second fund, which has closed at a little less than $100 million. That’s more than twice the size of the firm’s $40 million debut fund back in 2013, when new VCs setting up shop
Over the past few months, Yelp has been takin steps to help businesses reeling from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic — things like waived fees, virtual service listings and GoFundMe fundraisers (that last one had a mixed reception). But without getting into the question of whether the United States is reopening at the right
The alchemy for a successful startup can be hard to parse. Sometimes, it’s who you know. Sometimes it’s where you go to school. And sometimes it’s what you do. In the case of La Haus, a startup that wants to bring U.S. tech-enabled real estate services to the Latin American real estate market, it’s all
Adtech startup Admix is announcing that it has raised $7 million in Series A funding. The London-based company was founded by CEO Samuel Huber (previously owner of an indie gaming studio) and COO Joe Bachle-Morris (who previously worked in the ad agency world). The company is working to bring ads to games, esports, virtual reality
FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks has examined the President’s Executive Order that attempts to spur the FCC into action against social media companies and found it wanting. “There are good reasons for the FCC to stay out of this debate,” he said. “The decision is ours alone.” The Order targets Section 230 of the Communications Decency
Every company today is struggling to deal with security and understanding what is happening on their systems. This is even more pronounced as companies have had to move their employees to work from home. Uptycs, a Boston-area security analytics startup, announced a $30 million Series B today to help companies to detect and understand breaches
Spain-based CounterCraft, which builds b2b tools for gathering counterintelligence on evolving security threats, has closed a $5M Series A. The all cash round is led by Adara Ventures, with eCAPITAL and Red Eléctrica Group joining as new investors, and with participation from existing backers including Evolution Equity, ORZA, and Wayra. CounterCraft was founded back in
Apple is under formal investigation by antitrust regulators in European Union — following a number of complaints related to how it operates the iOS App Store and also its payment offering, Apple Pay. The Commission said today that it has concerns that conditions and restrictions applied by the tech giant may be distorting competition in
March 11 — Napster Co-founder and Facebook’s first president Sean Parker discusses the music streaming service, his relationship with Mark Zuckerberg and Uber. Sean Parker sits down this Emily this Sunday on Studio 1.0 at 9 a.m U.S. West Coast time and 12 p.m. New York time. (Source: Bloomberg)
Disrupt 2020 offers an unprecedented opportunity to introduce your pre-series A, early-stage startup to thousands of potential investors, customers, journalists, technologists and other influential movers and shakers around the world. How? Read on. Grab yourself a Disrupt Digital Startup Alley Package and get ready to virtually showcase your innovative products, platforms or services in front
Landing page optimization company Unbounce is announcing that it has raised $52 million Canadian (approximately $38.4 million in US dollars). Unbounce was founded back in 2009 with what co-founder and CEO Rick Perreault described as a goal of helping small and medium businesses easily create different landing pages where they can direct potential customers after
Facebook adds a personal off switch for political ads, T-Mobile lays off hundreds of Sprint employees and a content management platform raises $80 million. Here’s your Daily Crunch for June 17, 2020. 1. Facebook adds option for US users to turn off political ads, launches voting info hub Facebook made the controversial decision not to