Carving out 45 minutes or an hour for a workout can be difficult between work, home and daily life. Digital fitness and wellness company FitOn was created to provide 15- or 20-minute workouts aimed at getting people moving in whatever time they can make. The company closed on an $18 million Series B round of
Facebook is expanding its investment in audio initiatives with the launch of a new “Audio” destination in its mobile app in the U.S., where users will be able to discover all the audio formats Facebook now hosts in one place, including podcasts, Live Audio Rooms, and short-form audio. The company says it’s also making its
Alviere, an embedded finance startup that aims to help any brand deliver financial products and services to its customers and employees, announced today it has closed $70 million of new funding. In April, New York-based Alviere closed a $20 million Series A led by Viola Ventures and Viola Fintech, with the participation of CommerzVentures, Mitsubishi
Nearly a year after Dott originally announced plans to launch a bike-sharing service, the new offering is going live in Paris. Dott is better known for its scooter-sharing service across dozens of European cities. It is adding electric bikes to complement its service. In addition to Dott, Lime and Tier also have scooters currently available
When the Trump administration announced it would ban TikTok in the U.S., a number of alternative short-form video apps began to flourish, as users hedged their bets on a potential TikTok exit. Among these was Byte, an app co-created by Vine co-founder Dom Hofmann, which topped 1.3 million downloads in its first week alone. But
Fount, a robo-advisor startup in South Korea, has raised a $33.4 million Series C round to beef up its machine learning-based platform development and hire staff. The latest round was led by Hana Financial Investment, along with Nice Investment. Returning backers Smilegate Investment, KT Investment, Shinhan Capital and Korea Development Bank also participated. The
As last week came to a close, NerdWallet filed to go public. Given the late hour, our S-1 dive had to wait until today. The NerdWallet IPO comes at an interesting time. The company provides financial product recommendations to both consumers and SMBs, meaning that it dabbles in the same market that fintech startups play
Facebook’s external policy review board will meet with Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee who went public with her concerns about the company last week. Facebook’s Oversight Board announced Monday that it would meet with Haugen “in the coming weeks” after the whistleblower accepted the board’s invitation to speak. “Board members appreciate the chance to
Climate change has been the deepest, most challenging cognitive puzzle for humans to untangle these past years. It’s systems on top of systems, with emergent properties that can easily turn intuitive notions into catastrophic dead ends. Every action has a reaction or ten, and improving one part of the system almost invariably leads to weaknesses
HR technology has been thrown into the spotlight in the last 20 months: Covid-19 has changed the way we work, and so how we manage people in the world of work has had to change, too. Today, a Munich-based startup called Personio, which has built a big business out of how to address that issue
Marnix Broer Contributor Marnix Broer is the co-founder and CEO of StuDocu. Have you ever sat in a shared college dorm kitchen space with your roommate and decided to start a business? I should be clear here: We didn’t really decide to start a business; it was more of a project to create a tool
The potential for telehealth across Africa is vast and promising as mobile connectivity deepens, and innovations that could potentially bridge the doctor-patient ratio gap increase according to a Deloitte report. One company that is planning to drive the wave of telemedicine across the continent, as the Covid-19 pandemic rages on, is mPharma, a Ghanaian health
South Africa’s telecommunication provider Telkom SA SOC Ltd has since October discontinued Netflix Inc. from its phone and internet set-top box, said a Bloomberg report. Telkom’s Content Executive Wanda Mkhize said in a statement that the partnership between the two firms would not be renewed and declined to provide further details, Bloomberg reported. We have
Roughly two hours pass between my initial email and our first Zoom chat — on a Sunday, no less. I skip the post-gym shower and pop on a baseball cap, because I’m not sure when the opportunity will present itself again. After more than two decades of espousing the benefits of vertical farming around the
Jennifer Smith Contributor Jennifer Smith is CEO and co-founder of Scribe, a Princeton and Harvard Business School alum and is a technology investor and adviser formerly at McKinsey and Greylock Partners. When building a startup, you’re making what feels like a million decisions on timing — when to launch to time the market, when to
In the latest sign that that the tech industry is pivoting towards climate and sustainability, Atlantic Food Labs – an offshoot of the Berlin fund Atlantic Labs headed by long-time tech investor Christophe F. Maire – is relaunching as FoodLabs, with a dedicated €100m FoodTech fund to invest in food, health, and sustainability startups. Founded
Ahead of its launch on October 19, it seems as if retailers and Google are playing a game of chicken about who can leak the most information about its two upcoming flagship phones; the Google Pixel 6 and Google Pixel 6 Pro. Google’s Pixel line of smartphones has traditionally been the flagship of the Android armada
Disney’s newest digital service, Disney Genie, is launching on October 19 at Walt Disney World Resort. The service, first unveiled in August, is an update to the company’s earlier line reservation tools for Disney’s parks, allowing guests to plan and update their itineraries, book time slots for the most popular attractions, and optionally purchase paid
Mono, an African startup that helps connect consumers’ bank accounts to financial applications, has raised a $15 million Series A round, the company confirmed to TechCrunch today. The round, led by Tiger Global — the VC firm’s third major investment in Africa this year after Flutterwave and FairMoney — also had participation from new investors
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson isn’t a book that lauds ecoterrorists. In fact, it mostly manages to avoid the subject across its many pages. Yet, at the center of its speculative account about the eponymous ministry and its leadership over the next few decades, the dark side is the linchpin for
French startup Swile has raised a $200 million Series D funding round led by SoftBank International Group. With this funding round, the startup has now reached unicorn status, meaning that Swile has a valuation of $1 billion or more. Swile provides a payment card for employee benefits, such as meal vouchers, gift cards and sustainable
Just days after Voodoo acquired Beach Bum, another French mobile gaming company has news to share. Homa Games is raising a $50 million Series A round led by Northzone. The company partners with indie game studios and acts as a publisher. Other investors in today’s funding round include Singular, King, the founders of FuboTV and
Ariel Katz Contributor Ariel Katz is the co-founder and CEO of H1. More posts by this contributor The health data transparency movement is birthing a new generation of startups The epic fall from grace of Elizabeth Holmes holds lessons for everybody from CEOs to investors, commercial partners, the media — social or otherwise — and
Buckle up, it’s going to be a wild ride. The pace of change over the last few decades is only set to accelerate in the coming years, as improvements in biology, medicine, spacecraft, manufacturing, software and more continue to transform the very foundations of society, economics and politics. We cover these innovations pretty much daily
Sep.21 — Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky shares his thoughts on how travel will change after the pandemic, employees continuing to work from home, cracking down on “party houses,” and his company’s push to help house up to 20,000 Afghan refugees. He speaks with Bloomberg Technology’s Emily Chang.
The BaaS market is evolving rapidly and so are the options for companies who wish to quickly spin up new financial services by leveraging these bank-in-a-box APIs. We recently took a look at who the ideal customers and partners are for banking-as-a-service startups … And today we’re going to dig deeper into the different flavors
We’re just weeks away from COP26, the big environmental policy confab where scores of world leaders will descend on Scotland and determine the future of the planet, answering the question, “Should we all die or live?” That’s meant a whole truckload of new books on the subject, as well as renewed attention to older works
PideDirecto, a Mexico-based company, is developing a platform that enables local businesses in Latin America to sell directly to their consumers and deliver orders in less than 30 minutes. Hussein Fawzi and Ronni Samir launched the company with Anders Steiner and Antonio Nacoud in September 2020. Fawzi, Samir and Nacoud knew each other from Iraq
When you think about service meshes, a somewhat esoteric cloud native tool designed to stitch different microservices together, you might not think it’s the most lucrative side of the Kubernetes led cloud native market, but you would be wrong. Today, Solo.io, a Cambridge, Massachusetts service mesh startup, announced a $135 million Series C at a
Shares of IsoPlexis, a company creating tools to zoom in on the flurry of protein activity surrounding a single cell, began trading on Friday. The company aims to raise about $125 million with the IPO, which will be used to build the commercial team and advance the company’s plans to play a bigger part in