Reddit announced Friday that it’s acquiring MeaningCloud, a natural language processing company, for an undisclosed amount. The MeaningCloud team has joined Reddit and will support machine learning projects across its product, safety and ads teams. The acquisition marks Reddit’s first office in Spain. MeaningCloud was founded in 2015 and specializes in extracting meaning from unstructured
Amazon has agreed to simplify the process required for cancelling its Prime membership subscription service across its sites in the European Union, both on desktop and mobile interfaces, following a series of complaints from regional consumer protection groups. The coordinated complaints about Amazon’s confusing and convoluted cancellation process for Prime were announced back in April
What’s a poor, freshly minted developer to do when they’re out of coding boot camp but don’t have any real-life experience? You step into the world of simulation. That’s the basic premise of what Wilco offers. Last week, I covered the company’s $7 million seed funding round, and the company’s CEO, On Freund, was gracious
Queenly, a startup building a garment marketplace aimed at dressing women for formal events, announced this morning that it has purchased Mi Padrino, a company built to serve the quinceañera market. The two companies’ overlap is obvious: Quinceañeras, events where girls celebrate their 15th birthday with a large event and ornate garb, is an event
It’s a big week for startups developing technology for e-commerce marketplaces. We saw companies like Nautical Commerce bag $30 million in Series A funding to help any sized business create their own marketplace. Meanwhile, Shop Circle made its public debut with $65 million under its belt with apps so that Shopify merchants can quickly set
The U.S commodities regulator, Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), has filed civil charges against a South African company and its CEO for running a fraudulent commodity pool worth over $1.7 billion in bitcoin, and over registration violations. The regulator stated that the fraud scheme by Mirror Trading International Proprietary Limited (MTI), the South African bitcoin
European Union lawmakers have agreed a way forward on regulating the traceability of crypto assets being traded in the bloc. The rules are intended to curb the use of crypto for money laundering and terrorism financing by bringing in compliance requirements for crypto service providers, such as trading platforms. The provisional agreement on a new
Google said Thursday it will pay $90 million to settle a lawsuit with US developers that accused Google of abusing its power of app distribution and charging an unfair fee of 30% for app purchases and in-app purchases made through the Play Store. The company noted that US developers who made less than $2 million each
Khaby Lame is quite literally on top of the world (if TikTok follower counts are the world). After attending his first VidCon and surpassing Charli D’Amelio as the most-followed TikToker, the Italian Senegalese comedian signed on as an ambassador for Binance, the world’s largest platform for buying and selling cryptocurrencies. Just last week, Binance snagged
Somehow June is over in just a few hours, meaning that we are trotting toward the third quarter’s starting line. Leaving aside the uncomfortably rapid pace at which time is flying past us, entering a new financial reporting period is an excellent moment to pause, reflect and work out the key questions for the upcoming
Medical diagnostics company Visby Medical raised $100 million in a Series E round earlier this year. Today, the company told me it extended that round by an additional $35 million at the same valuation as the rest of the round. This financing will enable Visby Medical to scale production capacity from tens to hundreds of
Stacks of teeny lenses that look like inverted pyramids could juice up solar panels, helping them capture more light from any angle on both sunny and overcast days. Solar panels perform best in direct sunlight, which is why some solar systems track the big fireball across the sky, turning to face it for maximum light.
The future of non-fungible tokens is getting more clarity in China as the country’s tech giants come together to formulate standards for the nascent industry. The China Cultural Industry Association, along with Tencent, Ant Group, Baidu, and others, jointly issued a “self-disciplined development proposal” for the “digital collectible industry,” a rebranded term for NFT in
Fleetzero has an ambitious goal: to compete with global shipping companies with its own boats, powered entirely by electricity. The company just secured $15.5 million in new funding and is looking for the first ship to convert to run on its shipping container-shaped batteries. The company’s plan, described in detail here, is to convert existing
TaskHuman, a professional development platform focused on coaching, today announced that it raised $20 million in Series B funding led by Madrona with participation from Impact Venture Capital, RingCentral Ventures, Sure Ventures, USVP, Gaingels, PeopleTech Angels, Propel(x) and Zoom Ventures. The latest infusion brings the company’s total raised to $35 million, which CEO Ravi Swaminathan
Jonathan Martinez Contributor Jonathan Martinez is a former YouTuber, UC Berkeley alum and growth marketing nerd who’s helped scale Uber, Postmates, Chime and various startups. More posts by this contributor How to improve retention, growth marketing’s golden metric When and how to hire your startup’s first growth marketer If you search for “growth marketing” roles
Equity service platform Carta has acquired Vauban, an online platform that helps investors back private companies from end to end. As first reported by The Information, the deal was framed by Carta as a way to support investors of all sizes, from the sub-million-dollar level into the billions of dollars worth of dry powder. Carta
Welp. Three straight weeks of work travel amid a seemingly endless pandemic finally caught up with me. Forgive me, as I’m writing this under the influence of green tea and antivirals, so thank you in advance to the regularly Herculean efforts of our copy editor, David. Apparently the old adage of things happening in Vegas
Everyone’s favorite versatile microcontroller maker, Raspberry Pi, just unveiled a handful of new, budget-minded products. The company is building on the success of its $4 Pico board, which has thus far moved just under two million units since its January 2021 launch. The new Pico W is launching today for $6 — the “W” (and
Five years ago, the European Union passed rules which largely ended mobile roaming fees for citizens traveling with their devices across borders within the bloc. Today lawmakers are reupping the regulation that lets EU citizens “roam like at home” for a full decade, meaning European consumers can keep avoiding most extra fees when travelling within
Google today announced an update to its password manager that will finally introduce a consistent look-and-feel across the service’s Chrome and Android implementations. Users will soon see a new unified user experience that will automatically group multiple passwords for the same sites or apps together, as well as a new shortcut on the Android home
Solana Labs Co-Founder Anatoly Yakovenko joins Emily Chang to discuss their announcement of a new Web3-focused Android mobile phone Saga, along with an open source software toolkit, Solana Mobile Stack; and how they want to take on phone and app ecosystem giants like Apple and Google.
Mottu, a São Paulo-based motorcycle rental startup, has raised $30 million in equity in a Series B round of funding. The company, which aims to give independent couriers a way to work for logistics and food delivery apps, also secured $10 million in debt financing. Most, if not all, the workers have little to no,
Aiming to compete with Bilt in the nascent property renter rewards market, Stake, a startup that provides cash back and banking services to renters, today announced that it raised $12 million in a Series A round led by RET Ventures’ new RET Ventures ESG Fund. Enterprise Community Partners, Hometeam Ventures, Operator Stack, Shadow Ventures, Olive
Storytelling platform Wattpad is introducing a new creator program for writers that can earn them up to $25,000 in compensation. The company is also debuting a new metric called “Engaged Readers,” to help writers gauge readers’ interest in their stories, and Wattpad Creator Portal, a new site for writers to get tips and tricks about
On April 4, the U.K.’s development finance institution, Commonwealth Development Corporation (CDC) Group, formally changed its name to British International Investment. As part of the name change, the development finance institution (DFI) announced that it surpassed its pledge to invest £2 billion in Africa over the last two years. It was a reminder of the
The U.K. is planning to tweak an existing law to allow text and data mining “for any purpose,” in a move that’s designed to boost artificial intelligence (AI) development across the country. The announcement constitutes part of a broader strategy to “level up” AI and transform the U.K. into what it calls a “global AI
Most Americans dread doing their taxes. Surveys show as much. But as many as 40% rely on money from tax refunds to satisfy some financial obligation. Ben Borodach, a former Deloitte fintech strategist and the CEO of tax service provider April, believes this points to the need for taxpayers to change their behavior from thinking
Alex Song Contributor Alex Song is the CEO and co-founder of Proxima, a data science company that helps brands better reach consumers across all major platforms. More posts by this contributor Why D2C holding companies are here to stay Every day, the advertising world faces new challenges and opportunities. New platforms, mediums, M&A activity, privacy
New data indicates that startups are laying off more staff. That said, the pace of layoffs is modest compared with the early-2020 economic correction. As COVID locked down many nations for the first time, the global economy shuddered and startups were left to deal with an immensely changed world effectively overnight. Layoffs at companies like