Neighborhood social network Nextdoor and Walmart are teaming up today to launch a new “Neighbors Helping Neighbors” program that will make it easier for vulnerable community members to get assistance from neighbors who are already planning a trip to Walmart. The new in-app feature will allow Nextdoor users to post to groups associated with their
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Paige, the Sloan-Kettering spinout that has been building an artificial intelligence platform to improve cancer pathology and subsequently use those insights to develop better drug therapies, has raised an additional $5 million in funding to continue its work commercialising its platform and expanding its research reach, while also getting FDA clearance to launch in hospitals
Digital marketing company TapClicks announced this morning that it’s broadening its platform with the acquisition of AdStage. AdStage first launched back in 2013 as a cross-network advertising startup, eventually expanding by automating ad campaigns and consolidating marketing data. TapClicks founder and CEO Babak Hedayti told me that his goal is to build a “single, unified platform” for
Facebook today is introducing another feature aimed at making it easier to see who’s behind the posts published across Facebook and Instagram. The company says it will now display the location of the Facebook Page or Instagram account with a large audience on every post it shares, so end users have a better understanding of
Google Meet, like all video chat products, is seeing rapid growth in user numbers right now, so it’s no surprise that Google is trying to capitalize on this and quickly iterating on its product. Today, it is officially launching a set of new features that include a more Zoom-like tiled layout, a low-light mode for
SFC (formerly known as Startup Funding Club – a UK a seed stage investor – has received £10 million from British Business Investments (the commercial subsidiary of the British Business Bank), to deploy a total of £40 million across more than 100 early-stage startups in the UK. SFC intends to deploy the commitment in over
A team of researchers from Apple and Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute have presented a system for embedded AIs to learn by listening to noises in their environment without the need for up-front training data or without placing a huge burden on the user to supervise the learning process. The overarching goal is for
Last month, Spotify announced that as part of its coronavirus relief efforts it would soon add new fundraising features for artists on its platform. Today, the company is following through with the launch of “Artist Fundraising Pick,” a feature that allows artists to fundraise for themselves, their crews, or one of the verified music relief
Rocio Wu Contributor Rocio Wu is a venture partner at F-Prime Capital who focuses on early-stage investments in software/applied AI, fintech and frontier tech investments. While some U.S. investors might have taken comfort from China’s rebound, we still find ourselves in the early innings of this period of uncertainty. Some epidemiologists have estimated that COVID-19
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Today we’re unpacking some new data concerning what happened to Silicon Valley’s venture capital market in Q1, with a special focus on private financings towards the end of the three-month period. If the deterioration in
Ever since it first started rolling out, 5G skeptics have attempted to link the next-gen cellular technology to all manner of health issues. Most recently, it’s become an easy scapegoat for the global COVID-19 pandemic, given the rapid rise of both. Conspiracy theories have gained such a foothold that vigilantes have taken matters into their
The Los Angeles Cleantch Incubator is rebooting its incubator program and moving from rolling applications to a cohort model beginning with sixteen new startups. Los Angeles’ not-for-profit incubator exchanges sweat equity in the form of services and office space, and the promise of $20,000 in funding for local pilot projects, for a 1.5 percent to
AWS today launched Amazon AppFlow, a new integration service that makes it easier for developers to transfer data between AWS and SaaS applications like Google Analytics, Marketo, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Slack, Snowflake and Zendesk. Like similar services, including Microsoft Azure’s Power Automate, for example, developers can trigger these flows based on specific events, at pre-set times
When Liliana Pertenava decided to go all-in on crypto by investing $2,000 in a mining rig in 2017, she went so far down the crypto rabbit-hole she decided to make a documentary about it. If you’re locked-down and looking for something to watch, you could do worse than sit down and watch “Crypto Rush“, which
Google is adding a new feature to Search that will help you keep track of all the TV shows and movies you want to watch during these long weeks at home. The company had already been offering personalized TV and movie recommendations in Search, as of an update released last fall. Building out a watchlist
Ask any woman and she will tell you that most of her bras do not fit her optimally. In fact, a majority of women end up wearing the wrong size. A large part of the problem is that sizing is standardized, unlike women’s bodies. With every passing year, more people are shopping online, meaning fewer
M&A has largely slowed down in the current market, but there remain pockets of activity when the timing and price are right. Today, Medallia — a customer experience platform that scans online reviews, social media, and other sources to provide better insights into what a company is doing right and wrong and what needs to
Facebook’s major bet on Jio Platforms could create a headache for mobile payments services that have amassed tens of millions of users while struggling to find a business model in the world’s second-largest internet market. The $5.7 billion investment, Facebook’s second-largest to date, could also further its dominance in India — its biggest market by
Google’s data centers run 24/7 and suck up a ton of energy — so it’s in both the company’s and the planet’s interest to make them do so as efficiently as possible. One new method has the facilities keeping an eye on the weather so they know when the best times are to switch to
A year ago, back in the days of in-person conferences, Google officially announced the launch of its Anthos multi-cloud application modernization platform at its Cloud Next conference. The promise of Anthos was always that it would allow enterprises to write their applications once, package them into containers and then manage their multi-cloud deployments across GCP,
Meet Libeo, a French startup that just raised a $4.4 million (€4 million) funding round led by LocalGlobe with Breega and various business angels also participating. The company has built a service that helps you pay your providers much more easily. You no longer have to manually keep track of invoices, log into your banking
As smartphone sales began to plateau and slow over the past couple of years, many device makers arrived at the same conclusion: people want cheaper phones. It’s clear why companies like Apple and Samsung took the message to heart, as the smartphone market downturn appeared to coincide with the standardization of $1,000 premium devices. While
Online coding bootcamp Lambda School is the latest startup to announce layoffs, writing in a blog post that it’s made the “difficult decision” to cut 19 staff from roles across the company. The eight members of its executive team, including CEO and founder Austen Allred, are also taking a 15% pay cut, it said. Today
Facebook has enjoyed unparalleled reach in India for more than a decade. But as China’s fast-growing ByteDance emerges as a formidable competitor in what has become the world’s second largest internet market, the American giant has found the horse it wants to bet on in the new decade. Facebook announced today it has invested $5.7
Philadelphia-based Fishtown Analytics, the company behind the popular open-source data engineering tool dbt, today announced that it has raised a $12.9 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with the firm’s general partner Martin Casada joining the company’s board. “I wrote this blog post in early 2016, essentially saying that analysts needed to work
Could the coronavirus crisis — and the way different countries have responded — make Silicon Valley VCs more bullish on European startups? That’s the thesis put forward by Salman Ullah, co-founder and managing director of Merus Capital. As COVID-19 spreads globally, he argues that countries with national healthcare — along with fiscal and monetary policies
There is no shortage of coverage about the sprawling entertainment industry. There is a shortage of coverage for die-hard fans of reality TV shows, according to Kate Ward and Lindsay Mannering. That opening in the market is why the two — former colleagues at the women’s website Bustle, where Ward was the founding editor-in-chief and
Consumer financial services platform SoFi is making its first expansion outside of the United States with the acquisition of Hong Kong-based investing app 8 Securities. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Targeted to personal investors, 8 Securities will rebrand to SoFi Hong Kong and retain its team, who will began launching services in
Facebook has agreed to block access to certain anti-government content to users in Vietnam, following months of having its services throttled there, reportedly by state-owned telecoms. Reuters, citing sources within the company, reported that Vietnam requested earlier in the year that Facebook restrict a variety of content it deemed illegal, such as posts critical of
Rocio Wu Contributor Rocio Wu is a second-year MBA candidate at Harvard Business School and a venture capitalist. For the past month, VC investment pace seems to have slacked off in the U.S., but deal activities in China are picking up following a slowdown prompted by the COVID-19 outbreak. According to PitchBook, “Chinese firms recorded