Enterprise software companies are suddenly focused firmly on healthcare. If you want proof, look at how Oracle and Microsoft both backed up trucks loaded with money to buy health tech companies this year. At the moment, I’m compiling the top 10 M&A deals of the year, and the top two transactions are today’s $28.3 billion
The European e-scooter market is currently the main battleground for companies playing in the micromobility space, taking advantage as they are of Europe’s relatively compact cities and the desire of populations to move to more sustainable transportation. In 2021, players like Tier, Voi and Dott continued to raise VC backing. But the war for funding
Ameelio, a nonprofit startup that intends to replace inmate-paid video calling in prisons with a free service, is making inroads against the companies that have dominated the space for decades. With 9 facilities in Iowa up and running and talks progressing with dozens more ahead of a planned 2022 launch, the company may soon usher
Jamie Viggiano Contributor Jamie Viggiano is the chief marketing officer at Fuel Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm investing in consumer, SaaS and infrastructure businesses. More posts by this contributor 5 questions startups should consider before making their first marketing hire To be effective, each element of your brand’s ethos must be authentic. Your values
Someone’s education and work history can be similar to other resumes in a pile, but Searchlight aims to improve how companies measure a person’s soft skills to provide not only a differentiator, but also a better indicate of how well that person will ultimately fit into the organization. Kerry Wang and her twin sister, Anna
The relentless march of social media apps’ algorithmic advertising hooks, influencer-leveraged social graphs and UX that begs for endless scrolling have led to viral success and mass-market engagement for the biggest players. But there remains a continuing gap in the market for products that let us create things like photos and share them with selected
Who says the holiday week is a slow news week? Oracle was kind enough to help tech journalists weary from working on year-end stories with some big news today when the database giant announced it was buying electronic healthcare records company Cerner in a deal valued at $28.3 billion. “Oracle Corporation and Cerner Corporation today
In its latest (and last) pre-Christmas document reveal, European privacy advocacy group, noyb, has published details of an 86-page internal assessment by Facebook of its (continued) transfers of European’s personal data to the US — and the resulting conclusion can be best summed up as ‘The Emperor, Mark Zuckerberg, Has No Clothes’. The convoluted back
GDevelop is a game engine that lets you develop a video game without any specific development experience. While the ‘no-code’ trend has been quite popular this year, GDevelop has been around for a few years already. Florian Rival first started working on GDevelop as an open-source side project. The first public version on GitHub was
With supply chains in the automotive industry continuing to be disrupted due to Covid-19, demand has surged in the used-car market. Today, one of the startups that’s seeing a lot of growth as a result of that is announcing a big round of funding to further tap the opportunity. Cars24, a startup out of India
Hevo Data, a SaaS startup that is helping firms collate troves of data they generate and accumulate to make better use of them, has raised $30 million in a new financing round following a strong year of growth. Sequoia Capital India led the San Francisco and Bangalore-headquartered startup’s $30 million Series B round. A number
Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. As we entered 2021, I wrote about the big question on every startup’s mind for 2021: How will a cataclysmic event such as a pandemic show up in post-pandemic innovation? Well, spoiler
A proliferation of ominous, non-specific TikTok rumors suggested that schools across the U.S. faced threats of violence on Friday, December 17. While a number of schools responded to the trend by closing their doors, many local law enforcement agencies and at least one federal one have weighed in, disclosing that the threat doesn’t appear to
As capital continues to flood the startup market, I keep thinking about the activation energy needed to not only start a company, but remain in charge of one. This type of scaling strategy looks more human than a check — after all, venture doesn’t fix all things — in fact, it can even complicate the
Foursquare’s heyday is long over, but the problem of finding cool local stuff to do lives on. Most people seem to make it work through a sometimes reluctant combination of Facebook or Instagram and word of mouth, but the reality is that there aren’t many good apps that help us get off of apps and
Re:cap, a non-dilutive funding platform in a similar vein to Pipe.com and Capchase but based in Europe, has closed a Seed financing round of $111.5 million, in a mix of growth capital and liquidity for the revenue-based financing platform. re:cap’s first product is now officially going live, following a pre-seed funding in May of this
Gen Z isn’t satisfied with the social media they grew up with, so they’re building the apps that they want to use. A “social branding” app for creative teens and twenty-somethings, Tagg is announcing a $2 million seed round today from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Facebook’s former VP of International Growth Ed Baker, TripAdvisor founder
Fees on the Nubank IPO were among the lowest of the year, Bloomberg revealed this week. Of the $2.6 billion the Brazilian fintech’s parent company, Nu Holdings, raised in the operation, only 1.6% are going to its underwriters, which included Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and others. “Among 490 IPOs in the U.S. so far
John Callery Contributor The debate around social media’s impact on mental health is hardly new, but the conversation has recaptured the world’s attention in light of reports this fall that suggest Facebook has been well aware of the toxic mental health consequences of its platforms for teens. While this data — and the knowledge that
Food waste is a $2.6 trillion problem globally as some 40% of food is wasted annually. Full Harvest believes this is a distribution problem that can be solved by digitizing the produce supply chain. The San Francisco-based company’s produce business-to-business marketplace provides a way for produce buyers and sellers to quickly close deals on surplus
With e-commerce becoming increasingly globalized, a company called Taxdoo, which builds API-based tools to help e-commerce companies with tax compliance and other accounting needs, is announcing a round of funding: $64 million, a Series B that the Hamburg-based startup will be using to expand further across Europe and to build what it describes as the
Paying bills is hardly a fun thing. So I think it’s safe to say that any technology that can make the process easier is welcome by all. Papaya is a Los Angeles-based startup with a mission to do just that. It has developed technology to give people a way to pay bills outside of traditional
The fees investment banks charge to underwrite IPOs can gobble several points from a public company’s gross proceeds, but new competition is giving some firms a chance to hold on to more of that sweet debut money. This week, Nubank paid just 1.6% of the $2.6 billion it raised to its underwriters. As Bloomberg reported,
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. To close out the year, Natasha and Mary Ann and Alex headed to the mic with Grace and Chris behind the scenes. We got to our favorite topics, and honestly, got a chance
TikTok is preparing to launch a new service that will turn its viral food videos into meals you can actually order and enjoy. The social app is partnering with Virtual Dining Concepts to launch “TikTok Kitchen”-branded delivery-only restaurants across the United States next year, as first reported by Bloomberg. The menu at the restaurants will
While there is plenty of technology out there to help make a building more sustainable, the ability to incorporate features into its design can be easier said than done. Enter cove.tool, a startup that wants to make sure buildings are sustainable by design from the moment of inception. The Atlanta-based startup, which has raised $30
As companies get employees back into offices, startups like New York-based foodtech company Fraîche aims to be the brand feature that welcomes them back. Today, the company, founded in 2019, announced $2 million in seed funding by backers that included La Boulange’s Pascal Rigo, Petrus Winery’s Jean Moueix, Bakerly’s Bruno and Julien Caron and the
The European Parliament has agreed its negotiating position on draft legislation to put limits on how Big Tech can operate with the aim of rebooting competition and fair dealing in digital markets. The proposal also takes aim at so-called ‘killer acquisitions’ where powerful platforms buy up smaller rivals or startups to choke off alternative services
Alitheia IDF (AIF), a women-focused private equity fund in Africa has raised $100 million to invest in gender-diverse businesses across the continent. The fund is looking to bridge the financing gap for women-led or owned businesses in Africa – where women startup founders are less likely to receive funding despite their increasing enterprise. Women-only founders
Capital may help someone take the jump into entrepreneurship, but what about the activation energy to let them think that big in the first place? To Cory Levy, the latter has always been more important. The entrepreneur behind First Text, a low-friction service that connects founders to investors, launched Z Fellows last year to test