As companies struggle to find ways to control costs in today’s economy, understanding what you are spending on SaaS tools is paramount. That’s precisely what early-stage startup Quolum is attempting to do, and today it announced a $2.75 million seed round. Surge (a division of Sequoia Capital India) and Nexus Venture Partners led the round,
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The OpenStack Foundation today announced that StarlingX, a container-based system for running edge deployments, is now a top-level project. With this, it joins the main OpenStack private and public cloud infrastructure project, the Airship lifecycle management system, Kata Containers and the Zuul CI/CD platform. What makes StarlingX a bit different from some of these other
Byta, the music sharing service for pre-releases and other use cases where there is a need to share sound files privately, has picked up around $1.4 million in seed funding. The round was led by the Canada Media Fund, with participation from of private investors. They include musician Scott Kannberg, one of the original members
Facebook wants to be the go-to platform for all of your social needs, but a big move it made last month to take ownership in the world of GIFs — the short, looping videos that people use to convey sentiments in online conversations — may not go as it hopes. The UK Competition and Markets
Snap is going full speed ahead with its original content strategy. The company announced that it has expanded previous partnerships with ESPN, NBCUniversal, ViacomCBS, the NBA and the NFL for new Shows and Snap Originals. The new slate of Snap Originals includes unscripted series, docuseries as well as scripted dramas and comedies. Here are some
Snap is unveiling some important changes for Snapchat at its Snap Partner Summit. The navigation has been rethought with a new action bar at the bottom that lets you access Snap Map and Snap Originals in just a tap. Snap Map is also getting some brand new features to compete head-to-head with Google Maps. A
Jun.11 — Henrique Dubugras, Brex Inc. founder and chief executive officer, discusses the company’s credit card that helps e-commerce businesses grow and its latest funding round with Bloomberg’s Romaine Bostick, Caroline Hyde and Joe Weisenthal on “Bloomberg Markets: What’d You Miss?”
A lot of U.S.companies have had near-death experiences in recent months. Among them is Branch, a 1.5-year-old, venture-backed New York-based startup that sells what it calls “exceptional office furniture, at half the price” — and which nearly went kaput because of the pandemic. After generating roughly $800,000 in revenue in the first weeks of March,
Food delivery takes a big step toward consolidation, Amazon announces a moratorium on providing facial recognition tech to law enforcement (but there are loopholes) and Twitter tests a way to scold users for tweeting an article they haven’t read. Here’s your Daily Crunch for June 11, 2020. 1. Just Eat Takeaway confirms it’s gobbling up
Platform operators should treat personal media and mass media differently John Funge 8 hours John Funge Contributor John Funge is the Chief Product Officer at DataTribe, a cybersecurity startup foundry. He’s founded, built and sold three technology companies. Social media in its current form is broken. In 20 years, we’ll look back at the social
Michael Whitmire, CPA Contributor Michael Whitmire, CPA, is co-founder and chief executive officer at Los Angeles-based FloQast, Inc., a developer of accounting close management software. Traditionally, measuring business success requires a greater understanding of your company’s go-to-market lifecycle, how customers engage with your product and the macro-dynamics of your market. But in the most challenging
As schools stay closed and summer camp seems more like a germscape than an escape, students are staying at home for the foreseeable future and have shifted learning to their living rooms. Now, Norwegian educational gaming company Kahoot — the popular platform with 1.3 billion active users and over 100 million games (most created by
Snap is announcing at its Snap Partner Summit that the first games that will take advantage of Bitmoji will roll out soon. The feature has already been announced last year, and it looks like developers can finally take advantage of that SDK. You’ll be able to play a game with you as the hero —
As Uber and Lyft reached their public-market nadir in mid-March, you would have been forgiven for thinking they were heading under. If the markets are somewhat efficient, why else would America’s top two ride-hailing companies shed two-thirds and three-quarters of their value, respectively, in just over a month? As we know now, both companies quickly
Enterprise automation startup JIFFY.ai announced today it has raised $18 million in Series A funding for product development and expansion into new markets around the world. The round was led by Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from Rebright Partners and W250 Venture Fund. A roster of executives from tech companies also invested, including AssetMarket chief
When it comes to Twitter tweaks, the focus in the last several months seems to have been more on working on ways to make its platform less prone to being abused by people who use it to spread false and misleading information and harassment, and generally weaponise it for aims that are ultimately harmful. But
No business is immune to the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. We’ve seen Airbnb — a company particularly susceptible to this Black Swan event — go through an insane design sprint. Even enterprise collaboration tools have felt it, with Box readjusting its product road map to focus on how the tool worked for remote employees.
IQM Finland Oy (IQM), a European startup which makes hardware for quantum computers, has raised a €15M equity investment round from the EIC Accelerator program for the development of quantum computers. This is in addition to a raise of €3.3M from the Business Finland government agency. This takes the company’s funding to over €32M. The
London-based startup Codat has raised a $10 million funding round from Index Ventures. If you’ve ever tried to apply for a loan for your small business or filled out an application for an insurance product, you know it can be a long and painful process. Codat is building an API that connects with all the
Alkemics, the Paris-based platform that lets brands collaborate and launch products with retailers, has picked up €21 million in a Series C funding. It follows €20 million raised in 2016. Backing the round is growth-stage fund Highland Europe. Existing investors Cathay Innovation, Index Ventures, SEB Alliance and Serena Capital also participated. The new investment comes
Margaret Sessa-Hawkins Contributor Margaret Sessa-Hawkins is a MapLight contributor and journalist who focuses on the influence of deceptive online political messaging. Ann M. Ravel Contributor Ann M. Ravel is the Digital Deception Project Director at MapLight and previously served as chair of the Federal Election Commission. More posts by this contributor For true transparency around
Figma is one of the fastest-growing companies in the world of design and in the broader SaaS category. So it goes without saying that we’re absolutely thrilled to have Figma CEO Dylan Field join us at Early Stage, our virtual two-day conference on July 21 and 22, as a speaker. You can pick up a
French startup iBanFirst has raised a $23.8 million (€21 million) Series C round from Elaia and Bpifrance’s Large Venture fund. Previous investors include Serena, Breega and Xavier Niel. iBanFirst lets you pay suppliers and get paid by clients all around the world in dozens of currencies. iBanFirst was in the process of raising its funding
Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk took to the stage Thursday to unveil his new “Cybertruck,” an electric pickup truck. But, things didn’t go as planned when they tested out the “Tesla armor glass.”
Consolidation in the world of on-demand food ordering and delivery continues apace. Today, Just Eat Takeaway — the European company that only just got its own $7.8 billion merger approved by regulators in April of this year — officially announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire Grubhub in the US for an enterprise value
Planck, an AI-based data platform for insurance underwriting, announced today that it has raised a $16 million Series B led by Team8 Capital. All of the startup’s existing investors—Viola FinTech, Arbor Ventures and Eight Roads—also participated, while Nationwide and Hannover Digital Investments joined as strategic investors. Based in New York, Planck provides large insurance companies
A new Twitter test feature aiming to “promote informed discussion” will nudge users to read before they retweet. The company describes the test as a step to help people be more aware of what they’re sharing in a broader effort to inspire “healthier conversations” on the platform. Sharing an article can spark conversation, so you
When you think about startup hubs, Tulsa, Oklahoma is probably not the first city that comes to mind. A coalition of business, education, government and philanthropists are working to foster a startup ecosystem in a city that’s better known for its aerospace and energy companies. These community leaders recognized that raising the standard of living
Following the launch of Inbox.ai in March — its “Slack for external communications” — Amsterdam-headquartered MessageBird is continuing to place big bets on a messaging-first future. Not content with building a platform for customer service teams that lets them communicate with customers on a channel of their choosing, including all of the most popular messaging
Everyone needs a webcam these days, whether for business meetings or the distant socializing accomplished via video calling — but if you’re like most, you’re using the built-in camera on your laptop or some piece of junk from years ago. But if you happen to have a nice big-brand camera, it’s easy to set it