Sophie Alcorn Contributor Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives. More posts by this contributor Dear Sophie: Any advice on visa
Travel and tourism are slowly starting to move again in the wake of Covid-19 crashing over the world and sending us to shelter in place. Today a company focused on experiences — museum visits, skydiving, local cooking classes and more — is announcing a round of growth funding on the back of seeing its own
It’s been almost a year since the EU’s executive announced it would propose rules for political ads transparency in response to concern about online microtargeting and big data techniques making mincemeat of democratic integrity and accountability. Today it’s come out with its proposal. But frankly it doesn’t look like the wait was worth it. The
Camlist, a video marketplace for pets, has raised $1.3 million in a pre-seed round, funding that the startup plans to use to develop its platform and grow its workforce — as it looks to expand its reach in the UK, its second market (after the U.A.E.), which it entered earlier this year. Unlike other marketplaces,
Voice AI company SoundHound is set to go public on the Nasdaq via a SPAC transaction at a nearly $2.1 billion valuation in early 2022, blank check company Archimedes and its target announced. The last time you heard SoundHound’s name might have been several years ago when it was considered a lesser-known Shazam competitor. Now
It’s that magical time of year. No, I’m not talking about the upcoming holiday season. Instead, it’s time for AWS’s annual customer extravaganza re:Invent, which starts next week. The conference is always a newsy event with tons of new features and products being announced. It’s also a time for AWS to pull together the press,
It’s been well over two years since the UK’s data protection watchdog warned the behavioural advertising industry it’s wildly out of control. The ICO hasn’t done anything to stop the systematic unlawfulness of the tracking and targeting industry abusing Internet users’ personal data to try to manipulate their attention — not in terms of actually
Nigeria’s informal trade sector, worth over $244 billion, has more than 40 million micro, small and medium businesses. Most of these businesses operated offline until a few years ago when startups brought about digitization by providing infrastructure and a gamut of e-commerce and financial services. One-year-old Sabi — a spinoff from Rensource, an African energy
Sales of plant-based alternatives, like dairy and meat, are surging in the global market, and Perfeggt wants to do the same for the egg. The Berlin-based foodtech company is poised to debut its chicken-less egg product in the first quarter of 2022 in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Today, the company announced it raised $2.8 million
Cellular growth medium is a component of cellular agriculture that enables lab-grown meat to be made at a lower cost. However, the traditional ways of making these growth factors, or reagents, are costly themselves, which makes large-scale manufacturing difficult. On average, reports show that lab-grown meat costs about $50, but that new technologies could bring
Meet Pyxo, a French startup that has been thinking a lot about single-use plastic food packaging for the past three years. The company wants to offer a service that makes it as easy and as cost-efficient to use reusable food storage containers at scale. The idea behind Pyxo comes from a fair at the Tuileries
As many of the top cryptocurrencies seem to temporarily stabilize near all-time highs, users looking to speculate on tokens that are a bit more volatile are searching across exchanges to find deals. Amsterdam-based startup TabTrader has been capitalizing on this search with a platform that aggregates prices and token availability across dozens of exchanges. While
Life science company Longevica said Wednesday it is launching an open research tool so scientists and research institutions can access a data set that tracks the effects of more than 1,000 pharmacological compounds for testing drugs. This is the latest effort from the biotechnology company, which is researching mechanisms of healthy aging and life extension.
Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri will testify before the Senate for the first time as part of a series of hearings about online safety for children and teens. Per The New York Times, Mosseri’s hearing will take place on December 6. Mosseri’s upcoming testimony comes after Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) wrote a letter to Facebook
On a recently recorded (and soon-to-be published) episode of the Found podcast, an entrepreneur told my co-host and me that he sees a broad swath of the venture capitalists out there as money managers, more focused on short-term gains and returns than long-term revolutionary technology. Whether you agree or not, it’s hard to ignore the
Several French ministers have issued a common statement announcing that they have asked the main search engines and mobile app stores operating in France to hide Wish’s website and mobile app altogether. Wish is a popular e-commerce platform that mostly references products from China-based merchants. It doesn’t hold inventory as products are shipped directly from
Architecture and construction have always been, rather quietly, at the bleeding edge of tech and materials trends. It’s no surprise, then, especially at a renowned technical university like ETH Zurich, to find a project utilizing AI and robotics in a new approach to these arts. The automated design and construction they are experimenting with show
TikTok has seen its short-form video feed copied by a host of competitors, from Instagram to Snap to YouTube and even Netflix. Now it looks like you can add Spotify to that list. The company has confirmed it’s currently testing a new feature in its app, Discover, which presents a vertical feed of music videos
Boyd Davis Contributor Boyd Davis is the CEO and co-founder of Compright, a cloud-based compensation planning tool. Previously, Boyd helped organizations deploy solutions that leveraged data and AI. The Great Resignation is among the most significant events in recent U.S. history. We are seeing a post-COVID-19 generation refusing to work under the same conditions as
It’s boom times for startups building with or atop AI functionality: The Exchange explored the rise in venture capital dollars for AI startups last week, noting that investment into the business niche set all-time records in Q4 2020, and then successively in quarters one, two and three in 2021. The Exchange explores startups, markets and
Twitter is updating its iOS app to prevent tweets from disappearing while users are still reading them. The change comes as the social media giant recently updated its web platform to no longer automatically refresh timelines with new tweets. Twitter acknowledged that in the past, tweets would often disappear from view as users were reading
“Buy now, pay later” company Afterpay announced Wednesday that it was going after the $1.5 trillion global subscription payments market by offering to its U.S. customers payment installments for subscriptions, like gym memberships, entertainment subscriptions and online services. The service will launch in both the U.S. and Australia beginning early in 2022 and will be
Convincing meat eaters to adopt a climate-friendly diet might get a little easier thanks to Slovenian startup Juicy Marbles, which has come up with a way to create plant-based whole meat cuts, if that doesn’t sound too oxymoronic. ‘Fancy Plant Meat’ is its pithier pitch for a product that aims to provide a vegan alternative
Fairphone, the Dutch social enterprise dedicated to making consumer electronics (more) sustainable and ethical, including by supporting repairability so that users can hold onto their hardware for longer, has announced public testing of Android 10 for the six-year-old Fairphone 2. Owners of the modular handset that was first released back in 2015, running Android 5,
Last year, fintech API infrastructure players came into the African tech scene, ushering in Plaid-like services to businesses and developers. And the attention on these companies, particularly from venture capitalists, spiralled into this year, with each significant player raising large seed to Series A rounds. OnePipe, a fintech API company with a different play from
Mosaic Foods, a plant-based food company, announced Tuesday $6 million in seed funding as it continues to develop more products. The New York-based company came onto the food scene in 2019, co-founded by Matt Davis and Sam McIntire, with its line of frozen veggie bowls that includes recipes like peanut tofu bowl and butternut squash
Reddit is shutting down Dubsmash, its short-form TikTok-like video platform, on February 22, 2022. The company says after February, Dubsmash will no longer be available for download in the Apple App Store or Google Play Store. Currently downloaded apps will stop functioning on the same date. The company acquired Dubsmash in December 2020 and had
With capital in abundance, SaaS startups don’t seem to be too worried about how much runway they have remaining. According to OpenView’s annual Financial & Operating Benchmarks report, only 13% of nearly 600 companies surveyed named “burning too much cash” as one of their top three concerns, compared to 30% last year. While 2020 was
Meet Attio, a new CRM for people who are familiar with modern collaboration tools, such as Airtable, Notion and Zapier. The startup wants to create a product that can hold all important information about your customers, suppliers and partners, but that is also flexible so that you can organize, view and manipulate data easily. Attio
Mobiz, a South African startup integrating hyper-personalization into mobile marketing, has raised a pre-Series A round of $ 4 million from HAVAÍC, Futuregrowth, Launch Africa, Allan Gray E-Squared Ventures, CapaciTech and Endeavor’s Harvest Fund. The investment comes as the startup is ramping up efforts to expand into the U.S. and double down on marketing, sales and