Railsbank, the open banking and compliance platform, has picked up further investment, following the company’s $10 million Series A in September 2019. This time backing comes from Visa — a strategic investment, if you will — along with Global Brain, a venture capital firm based in Tokyo, Japan. The exact amount isn’t being disclosed, though
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Facebook’s ad review system is failing to prevent coronavirus misinformation from being targeted at its users, according to an investigation by Consumer Reports. The not-for-profit consumer advocacy organization set out to test Facebook’s system by setting up a page for a made-up organization, called the Self Preservation Society, and creating ads that contained false or
Mozilla Corporation announced today that it has chosen long-time chairwoman Mitchell Baker to be CEO, replacing Chris Beard, who announced last August he would be stepping down at the end of the year. Baker represents a logical choice to lead the company. At a time of great turmoil in the world at large, she brings
Mergers and acquisitions largely grinded to a halt at the end of March, in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic spreading around the world, but today comes news of a deal out of Europe that underscores where pockets of activity are still happening. Avira, a cybersecurity company based out of Germany that provides antivirus, identity
Quibi, the short-form, mobile-focused video service that Hollywood executive Jeffrey Katzenberg first hinted at in 2017, officially launched on Monday. After years of star-studded content announcements, not to mention $1.75 billion in funding, it might have been impossible for Quibi to live up to expectations. And indeed, it divided the hosts of the Original Content podcast.
The aerospace market is evolving quickly and merging with other segments of tech, making it an exciting space for both startups and investors — but the complications of the global pandemic are being felt by both. Bessemer Venture Partners investor Tess Hatch has been helping guide companies in their portfolio through these strange times, and
Motherly CEO Jill Koziol admits that it was a tough pitch when she and her co-founder Liz Tenety first tried to get investors on-board in 2015. “We wanted to create a brand first and foremost,” Koziol told me. “We did not want to go and build a media company or a [direct-to-consumer] company or Facebook
LinkedIn has no plans to make COVID-related layoffs until at least the end of June 2020, the professional network has confirmed to TechCrunch. This announcements comes after Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s pledge last month to have no significant layoffs for the next 90 days. Other business leaders such as Bank of America’s CEO Brian Moynihan
Earlier this week, the Equity crew caught up with Work-Bench investor Jon Lehr to get his take on the current market, and how his firm goes about making investment decisions. The conversation was a treat, so we cut a piece of it off for everyone to listen to. The full audio and a loose transcript
The UK government, like a number of other countries around the world such as the US, has stepped up its pace in providing relief in the form of loans for businesses being impacted by the coronavirus health crisis and the related shutdown that we’ve seen across the economy and life as we knew it. But
We finally know just about how many subscribers Hotstar has amassed over the years in India. “Approximately 8 million.” Disney said on Wednesday that its eponymous streaming service has hit 50 million subscribers, nearly 8 million of whom are in India, where it launched its service atop of Hotstar this month. Five-year-old Hotstar is the
Thrive, founded by Twitter alumni Deepak Rao and Siddarth Batra, wants to fund student expenses by looking at job offer letters as a way to evaluate loans. Today, it launched its loan platform and is accessible to students on over 400 campuses across 31 states. The San Francisco company helps underfunded students, a group that
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. So far, 2020 has proven to be a year of surprises and disappointments. Over the past month, we’ve seen companies like Toast go from raising huge new rounds this year at heightened valuations to layoffs
WhatsApp is imposing additional restriction on how frequently a message can be shared on its platform in its latest effort to curtail the spread of misinformation. The Facebook -owned instant messaging service said today that any message that has been forwarded five or more times will now face a new limit that will prevent a
With more folks working at home than ever, and many on machines outside the purview of IT and security teams, it’s becoming increasingly imperative to find creative ways to protect them from harm. Today, Box announced it was adding automated malware detection tools to Box Shield, the security product it announced last year. Aaron Levie,
The U.K.’s fintech’s response to the coronavirus pandemic so far might best be described as “move fast, [and] make things,” as multiple and sometimes impromptu teams roll out financial technology solutions to help combat the crisis. Last month, I reported on “Covid Credit,” a project that saw dozens of volunteers from the wider U.K. fintech
Neat, a Hong Kong-based fintech startup, announced today that it has raised a $11 million Series A to help small businesses do cross-border banking. The round was led by Pacific Century Group, with participation from Visa and MassMutual Ventures Southeast Asia, and returning investors Dymon Asia Ventures, Linear Capital and Sagamore Investments. Neat also announced
MyBuddy.ai, a startup that develops virtual tools to help kids learn English, announced today that it has raised $1 million in seed funding from LETA Capital. The capital will be used to expand into new markets and develop new features including mini-classes about health. The San Francisco-based company’s app features a AI-based virtual tutor called
Voice-based social networks and gaming as a new form of identity were amongst the top emerging trends in consumer social startups, according to an Extra Crunch survey of top social tech investors. Meanwhile, anonymity and dating apps with a superfluous twist were spaces where investors were most pessimistic. Extra Crunch assembled a list of the
The Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF), the home of the Cloud Foundry open-source developer platform, today announced that its executive director Abby Kearns is stepping down from her role to pursue an executive role elsewhere. If you’ve followed the development of the CFF for a while, it won’t come as a surprise that its current CTO,
A group of European privacy experts has proposed a decentralized system for Bluetooth-based COVID-19 contacts tracing which they argue offers greater protection against abuse and misuse of people’s data than apps which pull data into centralized pots. The protocol — which they’re calling Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (DP-PPT) — has been designed by around 25
Tyto Care, the provider of a home health diagnostic device and telemedicine consultation app, said it has raised $50 million in a new round of funding. The round was led by Insight Partners, Olive Tree Ventures, and Qualcomm Ventures, according to a statement, and brings the startup’s total capital raised to more than $105 million.
Airbnb turns to private equity for new funding, WhatsApp takes new steps to fight disinformation and another potential COVID-19 vaccine enters human trials. Here’s your Daily Crunch for April 7, 2020. 1. Airbnb turns to private equity to raise $1 billion Airbnb said Monday that it has raised $1 billion in debt and equity from
Today, Facebook quietly released a new app for couples. Called Tuned, the new release is a multimedia messaging app designed to help significant others communicate. The app is available for download in the U.S. and Canada, app analytics firm Sensor Tower tells us. Tuned was developed and released by Facebook’s New Product Experimentation (NPE) team.
WorkClout, a graduate of the Y Combinator Winter 2019 cohort, announced today that it has shifted its focus from manufacturing automation to manufacturing performance support and has raised a $2.3 million seed round. The funding was led by Spider Capital with participation from Y Combinator, Liquid 2, Soma Capital, Pioneer Fund, Mehta Ventures and several
Over the last several years, delivery services have become a key component of how retailers, or anyone selling or distributing products and services, do business. Now, with a global health pandemic in full swing keeping people indoors (and away from physical storefronts), delivery has become an essential must-have if you want your business to stay
Sony has revealed the design of the PlayStation 5‘s controller – a follow-on to its popular DualShock line that takes on a new name for a new generation: DualSense. The DualSense controller is kitted out in black and white, and looks like a futuristic, plastic armor-plated robot companion more than a gamepad in some ways.
Securitization is a critical function of the modern financial system. Banks “package” individual loans, say a mortgage or an auto loan, into a group with similar characteristics and sell them to other investors. That gets the debt off the originator’s balance sheet so that they can offer more loans, while also offering private investors alternative
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. We’ve dug into churn twice in the last week from an expert and data-based perspective. We’ve also spent a good amount of time talking to venture capitalists about how they are approaching today’s turbulent market.
Last year, The Information reported that CNN was working on a new digital news service to compete with the likes of Apple and Facebook. Today, some of those plans are taking shape. The Turner-owned news broadcaster has acquired Canopy, an all-purpose content personalisation that uses human curation, on-device machine learning and differential privacy to help