When it comes to the internet, content may be king, but in many cases, the emperor has no clothes. That is to say, the masses may click on interesting stories, video, music and other media, but building a lucrative business around that content can be a struggle, with advertising-based models often providing little in the
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B-Social, the London-based fintech building what it calls a “social bank,” is announcing that it has raised a further £7.8 million in seed funding. Once again the injection of capital comes from “high-net-worth” individuals. They include Rudy Karsan from Karlani Capital, although most of the investors remain undisclosed. It brings the total capital raised by
Just under a month ago Facebook switched on global availability of a tool which affords users a glimpse into the murky world of tracking that its business relies upon to profile users of the wider web for ad targeting purposes. Facebook is not going boldly into transparent daylight — but rather offering what privacy rights
Stonly is building a service for customer support teams so that they can share step-by-step guides to solve the most common issues. The startup just raised a $3.5 million funding round led by Accel with business angels also participating, such as Eventbrite CTO Renaud Visage and PeopleDoc founders Jonathan Benhamou and Clément Buyse. The startup
Tier Mobility operates a scooter service, the kick-scooter-with-a-motor kind. And it has acquired assets from Coup, a now defunct scooter service, the moped kind. Coup shut down late last year, and Tier Mobility plans to take over and start its own shared moped service. To be clear, Coup is over but its mopeds will stick
India is unlikely to have any substantial coverage of 5G until at least the end of next year, with telecom operators in the country yet to participate in spectrum auction. But that hasn’t stopped Chinese vendors Oppo, Vivo, and Xiaomi from bringing 5G-enabled smartphones to the world’s second largest handset market. Xiaomi, Vivo’s sub-brand iQoo,
Vimeo signaled last year its plans to move further into the social video creation and editing space with its acquisition of short-form video editor Magisto. Today, the company is unveiling the results of its work in the months following the deal’s close with the debut of Vimeo Create. The new app includes a set of
The student loan crisis in the U.S. has left venture capitalists searching for novel approaches to financing higher education, but can the same systems designed for helping coders in Silicon Valley get jobs at Google help underserved students in developing countries become part of a global work force? Similar to the buzzy San Francisco startup
Checkout.com, the quiet London-based payment platform, has acquired its first startup, ProcessOut. Checkout.com surprised everyone last year when it announced a gigantic $230 million Series A round. It turns out the payment processing boom is not over yet. Checkout.com focuses on enterprise clients with customers all around the world. It provides a full-stack payment service,
A significant majority of Americans have lost faith in tech companies’ ability to prevent the misuse of their platforms to influence the 2020 presidential election, according to a new study from Pew Research Center, released today. The study found that nearly three-quarters of Americans (74%) don’t believe platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google will be
It’s been a big news day for Salesforce . It announced that Co-CEO Keith Block would be stepping down, and that it had acquired Vlocity for $1.33 billion in an all-cash deal. It’s no coincidence that Salesforce targeted this startup. It’s a firm that builds five industry-specific CRMs on top of Salesforce — communications and
UK startup Babylon Health pulled app data on a critical user in order to create a press release in which it publicly attacks the UK doctor who has spent years raising patient safety concerns about the symptom triage chatbot service. In the press release released late Monday Babylon refers to Dr David Watkins — via
Let’s talk about money. More specifically, let’s talk about how much things cost. A few years back, the price of flagship smartphones leapt above the $1,000 threshold, owing largely to the cost of screen technology. It’s a tough calculus, but that’s the price of innovation. The rising cost of smartphones is largely regarded as a
Recapped. Layoffs. Slowdown. CEO transition. Budget cuts. Downsizing. In spite of a spate of massive startup exits the last few months, culminating in fintech’s shining moment yesterday with Intuit’s $7.1 billion acquisition of Credit Karma, it’s been a tough period for the startup world. Layoffs abound, centered perhaps on SoftBank’s Vision Fund portfolio but hardly
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Over the past three months, a number of financial events have occurred in the fintech and finservices world that have caught our eye. Between two rounds at $500 million and two exits in the billions
In Part 1 of our Virtual Worlds series, we look at how games have already become popular social platforms Eric Peckham @epeckham / 9 hours Video games are only getting more popular. Roughly 2.5 billion people around the world played games last year, double the number of players in 2013. Gaming is a $149 billion
To ward off a hostile takeover bid by Xerox, which is a much smaller company, HP (not to be confused with Hewlett Packard Enterprise, a separate public company) is promising its investors billions and billions of dollars. All investors have to do to get the goods is reject the Xerox deal. In a letter to
App Samurai, a platform to market mobile apps, has closed an investment of $2.4 million in Series A funding, led by 212 Ventures and co-invested by Collective Spark, 500 Startups and Degerhan Usluel. It’s now raised a total of $4.6 million which will be used to develop the mobile advertising group’s product portfolio and global
Sony announces a camera-centric phone, Microsoft offers more details about the next Xbox and a liquid biopsy startup raises $165 million. Here’s your Daily Crunch for February 24, 2020. 1. Sony announces its first 5G flagship, the triple lens Xperia 1 II Sony has announced its first 5G smartphone: The Xperia 1 II — for
Southeast Asian on-demand transport rivals Grab and Gojek deny that they are involved in talks to merge, but today Grab announced a piece of news that — at the very least — will divert attention from that story, or more likely stoke the fires of speculation that it is indeed gearing up for a deal:
Speedinvest, the European seed-stage VC that was started from Vienna but has since added offices in London, Berlin, Munich and San Francisco, has raised a new €190 million fund. It brings the firm’s total assets under management to more than €400 million. Describing its third fund as “oversubscribed” and ahead of schedule, SpeedInvest’s remit remains
MWC may have been canceled on account of rising coronavirus concerns, but the party still went on for Huawei (albeit to what appears to have been a mostly empty room). A year after wowing crowds with the Mate X, the company is introducing the Mate Xs. Rather than a proper successor, the device appears to
‘The companies that best meet their customers’ needs always end up winning’ Steve O’Hear @sohear / 8 hours Oxx, a European venture capital firm co-founded by Richard Anton and Mikael Johnsson, this month announced the closing of its debut fund of $133 million to back “Europe’s most promising SaaS companies” at Series A and beyond.
Chattermill, the London startup that offers what it calls a “customer understanding” platform that uses machine learning to gain scalable insights into customer feedback, has raised $8 million in Series A funding. Leading the round is DN Capital, alongside Ventech and btov Partners. Silicon Valley Bank also participated, in addition to a number of angel
Facebook’s Creator Studio has added a mobile companion. The insights dashboard for creators and publishers, which debuted globally in August 2018, is now available as a mobile app for both iOS and Android. Similar to the desktop hub, the Creator Studio app allows users to track how their content is performing across Facebook Pages, as
Commercial aviation isn’t typically the place to look if you’re after carbon-light initiatives. Jet fuel isn’t generally very green, and airplanes burn a lot of it when traversing the skies. But supersonic flight startup Boom wants to change the perception of commercial aviation as an emissions-costly prospect, starting with their testing development program for the
Fintech startup Revolut is raising a large Series D round of funding. TCV is leading the $500 million round, valuing the company at $5.5 billion. Over the past few years, Revolut has raised $836 million in total. Some existing investors are also participating in today’s funding round, but Revolut isn’t sharing names. Previous investors include
The specter of constant surveillance hangs over all of us in ways we don’t even fully understand, but it is also possible to turn the tools of the watchers against them. Forensic Architecture is exhibiting several long-term projects at the Museum of Art and Design in Miami that use the omnipresence of technology as a
Allowance is going digital. Venmo has been spotted prototyping a new feature that would allow adult users to create a debit card connected to their account for their teenage children. That could potentially let parents set spending notifications and limits while giving kids more flexibility in urgent situations than a few dollars stuffed in a
So far this year, one of the most eye-popping startup exits has been Visa’s $5.3 billion acquisition of fintech data services platform Plaid. It’s a major exit in the white-hot fintech space, and while that transaction is still going through regulatory reviews, already some current Plaid employees are becoming alumni and fanning out into the