With more than 1,200 employees distributed across over 65 countries and a valuation of nearly $3 billion, GitLab is one of the world’s most successful fully remote startups. Describing it as a textbook example of a remote company would be redundant, because the company actually wrote a textbook about it. I recently had a chance
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This might seem like the worst time to be building an event software business, but it seems to be working for Bevy.com, which just announced that it has raised $15 million in Series B funding. Co-founder and CEO Derek Andersen explained that the company had already started moving into virtual events when the conference business ground to
Starting today, you’ll be able to browse and buy products directly from a business’ Facebook Page or Instagram profile. Both Facebook and Instagram already supported a degree of ecommerce — for example, Facebook has its Marketplace and will likely make a bigger push through its Libra cryptocurrency initiative, while Instagram allows users to buy products
Microsoft today announced the launch of the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, an industry-specific cloud solution for healthcare providers. This is the first in what is likely going to be a set of cloud offerings that target specific verticals and extends a trend we’ve seen among large cloud providers (especially Google), who tailor specific offerings to
Contentsquare, the cloud-based platform that helps businesses understand how and why users are interacting with their app, mobile and web sites, has closed $190 million in Series D funding. The round is led by BlackRock’s Private Equity Partners team, with participation from previous investors. In addition, as part of this round, Sapiance Capital Limited is
I’m supposed to get photos as soon as I take something out of the box. I know better. The rule is not to play with the gadget first. I’m going to crash the drone; I always do. I crashed the DJI Mavic Air 2 and broke a landing peg. I flew the drone before I
TikTok enlists a big name from Disney as its new CEO, Walmart is shuttering its Jet e-commerce brand and EasyJet admits to a major data breach. Here’s your Daily Crunch for May 19, 2020. 1. Disney streaming exec Kevin Mayer becomes TikTok’s new CEO Mayer’s role involved overseeing Disney’s streaming strategy, including the launch of
Nov. 4 — Former Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer joins host Emily Chang on “Bloomberg Studio 1.0” to discuss his relationship with Bill Gates. Like this video? Subscribe to Bloomberg Technology on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/BloombergTech?sub_confirmation=1 Subscribe to Bloomberg for the latest business news: http://www.youtube.com/Bloomberg?sub_confirmation=1 And subscribe to Bloomberg Politics for the latest political news: http://www.youtube.com/BloombergPolitics?sub_confirmation=1
The cannabis market was in the midst of a correction when the COVID-19 crisis hit and could emerge stronger than ever. After a breakthrough period of growth, cannabis startups entered 2020 with depressed values and an uncertain future. Now, with millions sheltering in place, many companies are seeing unprecedented demand and growth opportunities as many
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Yesterday afternoon, Vroom, an online car buying service, filed to go public. Based on its SEC filing, Vroom is a highly-successful private company in fundraising terms that has attracted over $700 million during its life
A livestreamed “debate” yesterday between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a European commissioner shaping digital policy for the internal market, Thierry Breton, sounded cordial enough on the surface, with Breton making several chummy references to “Mark” — and talking about “having dialogue to establish the right governance” for digital platforms — while Zuckerberg kept it
Search-as-a-service startup Algolia is announcing some changes at the helm of the startup. Co-founder and CEO Nicolas Dessaigne is transitioning to a non-operational role at the company. He’ll still be a board member, but Bernadette Nixon is joining the company to take on the CEO position. Algolia is building a search engine API. The company
After months of news about large-scale event cancelations, Berlin-based mega-conference IFA announced today that it will go ahead with a planned in-person event, from September 3 to 5. With the future of the COVID-19 pandemic still uncertain around the world, the show will come with some major caveats. For starters, the show, which traditionally takes
Users are reporting that trading platform Robinhood is down on a day that’s seen stock markets soar. Robinhood’s status page says all systems are “operational,” but users on Twitter said they could not access the service. Robinhood did not immediately comment when reached. Some users said Etrade was also experiencing problems. A spokesperson for Etrade
With a large proportion of knowledge workers doing now doing their jobs from home, the need for tools to help them feel connected to their profession can be as important as tools to, more practically, keep them connected. Today, a company whose platform helps do precisely that is announcing a growth round of funding after
A comprehensive study into how startups will work in the future, in the wake of the global COVID-9 pandemic, has been launched by UK non-profit Founders Forum. The initiative comes in the wake of a number of organizations announcing extended offices closures and ‘Work From Home’ policies. The group hopes the COVID-19 Workplace Survey will
Amidst the blitz of SoftBank earnings news today comes the financials for all of SoftBank’s subsidiaries, which includes Arm Holdings, the most important chip design and research company in the world that SoftBank bought for $32 billion back in 2016. Arm produces almost all of the key designs for the chips that run today’s smartphones,
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Today we’re digging into SoftBank’s latest earnings slides. Not only do they contain a wealth of updates and other useful information, but some of them are gosh-darn-freaking hilarious. We all deserve a bit of levity
A famous investor published notes today concerning its startup investments, detailing where they excelled and where they struggled. To understand why we care about this particular investor’s results, a little context helps. The investor in question is Japanese telecom giant and startup benefactor SoftBank, which reported its fiscal year’s results this morning. SoftBank’s investments are
When Verizon (which owns this publication) announced it was buying video conferencing company BlueJeans for around $500 million last month, you probably thought it was going take awhile to bake, but the companies announced today that they has closed the deal. While it’s crystal clear that video conferencing is a hot item during the pandemic,
European startups are calling for more flexibility in EU state aid rules to allow national governments to provide liquidity for the region’s fledgling digital businesses during the COVID-19 crisis. In a joint letter addressed to Commission EVP Margrethe Vestager, more than a dozen startup associations from across the bloc have called for rules to be
Kevin Mayer, head of The Walt Disney Company’s direct-to-consumer and international business, is departing to become CEO of TikTok, as well as COO of the popular video app’s parent company ByteDance. Founder Yiming Zhang will continue to serve as ByteDance CEO, while TikTok President Alex Zhu (formerly the co-founder of the predecessor app Musical.ly) becomes
Jul.21 — IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson, co-founder of Ethereum Network, discusses Bitcoin and the landscape for initial coin offerings. He speaks with Caroline Hyde on “Bloomberg Technology.”
Julian Shapiro Contributor Julian Shapiro is the founder of BellCurve.com, a growth marketing team that trains startups in advanced growth, helps hire senior growth marketers and finds vetted growth agencies. He also writes at Julian.com. More posts by this contributor Use accelerated retargeting to increase conversions Break-even ads can generate free brand awareness We’ve aggregated
A few housekeeping notes. First, the main, long-from Equity episodes still drop every Friday, so if you are behind, check your podcast feed. Also, we’re running a listener survey which you can find here, in the last ep’s shownotes. And finally, I am off next week, so Danny Crichton will take over Equity Monday for
Electric, the platform that puts the IT department in the cloud, has today announced new funding following a continuation of its Series B earlier this year. Dick Costolo and Adam Bain (01 Advisors) and the Slack Fund participated in the $7 million capital infusion. 01 Advisors put up the majority of the financing ($6 million)
Argent is launching the first public version of its Ethereum wallet for iOS and Android. The company has been available as a limited beta for a few months with a few thousand users. But it has already raised a seed and a Series A round with notable investors, such as Paradigm, Index Ventures, Creandum and
Huawei is facing an uphill challenge in the overseas market as its upcoming devices lack the full set of Google apps and services. That leaves ample room for its Chinese rivals to chase after foreign consumers. That includes Oppo, the sister brand of Vivo under Dongguan-based electronics holding company BBK. In an announcement on Monday, the
The COVID-19 pandemic has ushered in a wave of Chinese companies with manufacturing operations to produce virus-fighting equipment: Shenzhen-based electric vehicle giant BYD quickly moved to launch what it claims to be the world’s largest mask plant; Hangzhou-based voice intelligence startup Rokid is making thermal imaging glasses targeted at the US market; and many more. The
Ashwin Ramasamy Contributor Ashwin Ramasamy is the co-founder of PipeCandy, an online merchant graph company that discovers and analyzes business and consumer perception metrics about D2C brands and e-commerce companies. More posts by this contributor D2C companies deliver customer delight and simplicity The different playbooks of D2C brands E-commerce is taking off faster than ever.