Yes, the Pixel Watch is the thing. Google undoubtedly took some of the wind out of its own sails (and, perhaps, sales) by talking up a number of products we won’t be seeing for several months — and, in one case, a year — but let’s focus on the here and now for a moment.
Zeals, a Tokyo-based startup that lets businesses communicate with their customers via its chat application, said Thursday it has secured $27.2 million (3.5 billion yen) in equity and $11.6 million (1.5 billion yen) in debt. The latest round brings its total funding raised to $41.4 million, the company said without disclosing its valuation. JIC Venture
Good Startup founders Gautam Godhwani and Jayesh Parekh Good Startup, a Singapore-based venture capital firm focused on alternative protein, has closed its latest fund. Consisting of $34 million, the new fund, called Good Protein Fund I, included participation from Vinmar International founder and chairman Vijay Goradia; former head of finance and strategy for Fidelity Investments
A controversial Texas law that would open social media companies up to lawsuits from aggrieved users just notched a surprise win. A trio of federal appeals court judges issued the ruling Wednesday, which pauses a temporary injunction that blocked the law from taking effect last year. The law, HB 20, would prohibit tech platforms from
I’ve been learning Arabic for a couple of years, after one of my previous startups had a large-ish team of developers in Egypt. Even though I’m only a novice, I did spot something truly bizarre in today’s keynote at Google I/O: A bunch of the languages on the slide are … wrong? The text in
The United Kingdom has a small but growing space industry, with the number of space-related organizations increasing by an average of 21 percent each year since 2012, but there is one key component it’s lacking — launches. There have been no space launches from U.K. soil, but that’s about to change. The U.K. has announced
DJI has just introduced a new drone — its most capable ever to squeak under the 250 gram limit that keeps operators free from a whole host of headaches and restrictions for flight (note that local laws and rules still do apply — being small doesn’t mean you can do anything you want). The DJI
Last August, Google tried something different. The company offered a sneak peek at the Pixel 6 several months ahead of its official announcement. The reasoning seemed sound. The company had spent several years working to reinvigorate the flagging smartphone line, and it was ready to show it off. Even more importantly, it wanted to build
Indoor navigation was something we heard about a lot after the launch of the iPhone and during that first wave of location-based apps. But the technology has quietly evolved over the last few years and may now be more important than ever. Oriient, which powers the platform that Instacart shoppers use to gather their orders
Remote hiring company Deel has raised $50 million at a $12 billion valuation, according to an Axios report. Axios’ Dan Primack broke the news this morning, citing anonymous sources. He wrote that “new investors include Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective, while existing company backers include Andreessen Horowitz, Spark Capital and Y Combinator.” To say that
Twitter announced today that it has rolled out a new web video game to make it easier for users to understand its privacy policy. The goal of the game, which is called Data Dash, is to educate people on the information that Twitter collects, how the information is used and what controls users have over
When AWS launched its storage offering in 2006, it began a march to offer compute, storage and database services in the cloud. Google, Microsoft, Alibaba and IBM among others would follow. One player that might not be top of mind in this market is Cloudflare, but with its announcement today of a new SQL database
The European Union has formally presented its proposal to move from a situation in which some tech platforms voluntarily scan for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) to something more systematic — publishing draft legislation that will create a framework which could obligate digital services to use automated technologies to detect and report existing or new
The last thing we need in this world is more guns. But we’re getting them whether we like it or not, so wouldn’t it be nice if those guns had safety mechanisms like our phones, making them impossible for anyone but their owners to use? That’s what Biofire is building, and it has raised $17
YouTube is expanding on its latest feature that made any public YouTube video potential fodder for its TikTok competitor, YouTube Shorts. Today, the company is announcing the launch of “Green Screen,” a tool that will allow users to use up to a 60-second video segment from any eligible YouTube video or YouTube Short as the
Mobile penetration in Africa is growing impressively at about 46% as more people come online for the very first time. In turn, this has increased the market opportunity for startups, especially fintechs and e-commerce, which try to provide various solutions to meet the financial needs of the populace. But to do that, these businesses must
Mylerz, a Cairo-based e-commerce fulfillment startup, plans to enter three new markets in North Africa and expand across Egypt over the next three months against the backdrop of the $9.6 million funding it has just secured. The startup also has its eyes on the growing e-commerce market in East Africa, with the long-term goal of
Twitter announced today that it’s rolling out a new “Copypasta and Duplicate Content” policy to clarify how the platform works to combat spam and duplicative content. For context, copypasta refers to an attempt by multiple individuals to duplicate content from an original source and share it widely. The social media giant first revealed in August
Arrikto’s mission is to enable data scientists to build and deploy their machine learning models faster. The company, which raised a $10 million Series A round in late 2020, is building its platform on top of Kubeflow, a cloud-native open-source project for building machine learning operations that was originally developed by Google but which is
VC firm Educapital recently announced that it has reached the first close of its second fund. The team has already secured $105 million (€100 million) and now wants to reach $160 million (€150 million) to invest in edtech startups as well as companies working on the future of work. I caught up with Marie-Christine Levet,
Hunting down a beat up-looking shared electric scooter that has the germs of goodness-knows-who all over the handlebars is not Unagi’s idea of sexy shared micromobility. Instead, the e-scooter manufacturer is launching a more exclusive version that will see its slick e-scooters available to rent at hotels, luxury apartments and coworking spaces. “Unagi on Demand,”
Canoo’s first-quarter earnings shows a company burning through cash, no near-term revenue and a warning that it may not have enough money to stay in business. Shares of Canoo, which were down 5% Tuesday, fell another 17.5% in after-market trading following the release of its earnings. It has since recovered and is now down more
Consumers in every country are getting squeezed on all sides. Globally, sluggish wage growth and rising inflation has encouraged shoppers to defer payments on everything from groceries to durable goods. Affirm, Afterpay and Klarna own 75% of the sector in the U.S., which leaves little room for startups hoping to join the fray. Founders who
Twitter’s future owner weighed in on the social network’s biggest question Tuesday, leaving little room for doubt that if Elon Musk has his way, the platform’s doors will be wide open for Trump. “I do think that it was not correct to ban Donald Trump,” Musk said in an interview at the Financial Times Future
There’s an open secret in the battery startup world — everyone is pitching their cells as the ones to spur consumers to ditch their gas-guzzling SUVs for sleek, fast-charging electric vehicles with cross-country range, even if they’re really eyeing something else. Sure, some companies will leapfrog the steady 5% annual improvements that lithium-ion batteries have
The UK government has confirmed it will move forward on a major ex ante competition reform aimed at Big Tech, as it set out its priorities for the new parliamentary session earlier today. However it has only said that draft legislation will be published over this period — booting the prospect of passing updated competition
Hardware, as the saying goes, is hard; but there remains an opportunity for startups that focus on specific niches to build viable businesses. In the latest example, reMarkable, the Oslo, Norway-based maker of a simple and slick $299 e-paper tablet of the same name, says that it has passed 1 million devices sold since 2017
Adam Oliner, co-founder and CEO of Graft used to run machine learning at Slack, where he helped build the company’s internal artificial intelligence infrastructure. Slack lacked the resources of a company like Meta or Google, but it still had tons of data to sift through and it was his job to build something on a
Construction tech is one of those sectors that has not historically been considered “sexy” in a startup world that often favors glitzier technology. But construction fuels the commercial and real estate industries, which in turn impacts all of us in one way or another. Historically, the industry has been reluctant to embrace technology, but as
Adobe announced today that it’s introducing a new suite of Creative Cloud Express capabilities to make it easier to plan, schedule, preview and publish social media content across platforms. The company is launching “Content Scheduler” within Creative Cloud Express, which builds on its acquisition of ContentCal in December, as Adobe has integrated ContentCal into Creative