Byju’s said on Thursday it has acquired California-headquartered Tynker, a leading coding platform for K-12 students, the latest in a series of major purchases as the Indian edtech giant attempts to aggressively expand to international markets. The companies didn’t disclose the terms of the deal, but a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch that
Companies typically have to settle on strategies that align with their customers, employees, investors, and regulators. The more they know about how the other side will decide, the clearer their own strategies become. If regulators always prefer choice for consumers, then it is easy for a platform to allow multiple payment choices: Shopify allows multiple
Concreit, a company that wants to open real estate investing to a broader group of people, announced today that it has closed $6 million in a seed funding round led by Matrix Partners. Hyphen Capital also participated in the round, in addition to individual investors such as Betterment founder and CEO Jon Stein; Andy Liu,
Sorcero announced Thursday a $10 million Series A round of funding to continue scaling its medical and technical language intelligence platform. The latest funding round comes as the company, headquartered in Washington, D.C. and Cambridge, Massachusetts, sees increased demand for its advanced analytics from life sciences and technical companies. Sorcero’s natural language processing platform makes
Gingko Bioworks, a synthetic biology company now valued at around $15 billion, begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange today. Gingko’s market debut is one of the largest in biotech history. It’s expected to raise about $1.6 billion for the company. It’s also one of the biggest SPAC deals done to date — Gingko
Self Financial, a fintech company that aims to help consumers build credit and savings at the same time, announced today it has raised $50 million in Series E funding. Altos Ventures led the financing, which also included participation from Meritech Capital and Conductive Ventures and brings the Austin-based startup’s total raised to $127 million since
Performance reviews eat up a lot of a manager’s time and are often the most dreaded part of work. OnLoop aims to bring some joy into the process by enabling information-gathering to happen behind the scenes and be easier for hybrid workforces. The Singapore-based company designed a mobile-first product that consistently gathers employee feedback and
Apple is planning to remove developer access to important user data as part of its iOS 15 release on Monday, leaving email marketers in a dilemma about how they will figure out metrics. To find out how the industry is approaching this problem, we spoke with Vivek Sharma, CEO of Movable Ink, a software consultancy
Mynd, a company that aims to make it easier for people to buy and manage single-family rental properties, announced today it has raised $57.3 million in funding from QED Investors. The financing values the Oakland, California-based company at $807 million, and brings the company’s total raised to $174.9 million since its 2016 inception. Invesco Real
Fiberplane, an Amsterdam-based early stage startup that is building collaborative notebooks for SREs (site reliability engineers) to collaborate around an incident in a similar manner to group editing in a Google Doc, announced a € 7.5M (approximately $8.8 million USD) seed round today. The round was co-led by Crane Venture Partners and Notion Capital with
“I’ve seen startups spend thousands of dollars inefficiently as a result of not having optimal signal in their paid acquisition campaigns. I’ve also spent millions at companies such as Postmates refining our signal to the best possible state,” says growth marketer Jonathan Martinez in a guest column for Extra Crunch this week. “I’d like every
Startups are raising record sums around the world, thanks to several contributing factors. As The Exchange explored yesterday, historically low interest rates have helped venture capitalists raise more capital than ever, to pick an example. Low rates have helped startups in another manner: As yields fell for certain assets, investors chased returns by betting on
Six months after securing a $23 million Series A round, Ketch, a startup providing online privacy regulation and data compliance, brought in an additional $20 million in A1 funding, this time led by Acrew Capital. Returning with Acrew for the second round are CRV, super{set} (the startup studio founded by Ketch’s co-founders CEO Tom Chavez
Rhys Spence Contributor Rhys Spence is head of research at Brighteye Ventures, a European edtech-focused fund, where he works with portfolio companies to help address priorities, with a focus on internationalization. More posts by this contributor The 2021 edtech avalanche has just begun It’s a story common to all sectors today: investors only want to
Nick Costelloe Contributor Nick writes actionable growth marketing insights as head of content at Demand Curve. More posts by this contributor Demand Curve: 10 lies you’ve been told about marketing When people are uncertain, they look to others for behavioral guidance. This is called social proof, which is a physiological effect that influences your decisions
While the technology and business world worked towards the weekend, developer operations (DevOps) firm GitLab filed to go public. Before we get into our time off, we need to pause, digest the company’s S-1 filing, and come to some early conclusions. GitLab competes with GitHub, which Microsoft purchased for $7.5 billion back in 2018. The
Nagaraj Nadendla Contributor Nagaraj Nadendla is SVP of development at Oracle Cloud HCM, where he leads the development of cloud recruitment solutions including Oracle Recruiting and Taleo. Social media has served as a launchpad to success almost as long as it has been around. The stories of going viral from a self-produced YouTube video and
It’s been a heady 12-18 months for Zoom, the decade-old company that experienced monster 2020 growth and more recently, a mega acquisition with the $14.7 billion Five9 deal in July. That addition is part of a broader strategy the company has been undertaking the last couple of years to move beyond its core video conferencing
The EU will use legislation to push for greater resilience and sovereignty in regional semiconductor supply chains. The bloc’s president trailed a forthcoming ‘European Chips Act’ in a state of the union speech today. Ursula von der Leyen suggested that gaining greater autonomy in chipmaking is now a key component of the EU’s overarching digital
May.19 — With the semiconductor industry facing a global chip shortage, one company in the eye of the storm has been experiencing a meteoric rise: AMD. At the helm is engineer turned CEO Lisa Su, who transformed the company into a chip powerhouse. Shares are up 2240% under her tenure and AMD chips, short for
Major gains in online advertising have boosted valuations for adtech startups since the pandemic began, but one insider says investors are missing the party. “Adtech is having a moment,” writes industry veteran Casey Saran. “And while much of the oxygen has been soaked up by large legacy companies hitting the public market, there have been
Natasha and Mary Ann and Alex were all aboard this week under the guidance of Chris and Grace, which meant we had the full team. And speaking of teams, Mary Ann is joining the Friday show on a weekly basis now. She’s been a friend for years, and a colleague now twice-over for Natasha and Alex and we could not be more
Facebook today is announcing the launch of new products and features for business owners, following the threat to its ad targeting business driven by Apple’s new privacy features, which now allow mobile users to opt out of being tracked across their iOS apps. The social networking giant has repeatedly argued that Apple’s changes would impact
Aircover raised $3 million in seed funding to continue developing its real-time sales intelligence platform. Defy Partners led the round with participation from Firebolt Ventures, Flex Capital, Ridge Ventures and a group of angel investors. The company, headquartered in the Bay Area, aims to give sales teams insights relevant to closing the sale as they
Apple and Google have removed a tactical voting app created by the organization of jailed Kremlin critic, Alexei Navalny, from their respective mobile app stores in Russia. Earlier this week Reuters reported that the Russian state had been amping up the pressure on foreign tech giants ahead of federal elections — appropriating the language of
You’ve probably learned from Reid Hoffman before, either through his inventions, investments or inspirational words. The entrepreneur is the co-founder of LinkedIn, a partner at Greylock and the author of a new book based off of his hit podcast, Masters of Scale. His storied past makes him chock-full of interesting anecdotes and lessons, which is
Avalanche, a relatively new blockchain with a focus on speed and low transactions costs, has completed a $230 million private sale of AVAX tokens to some well known crypto funds. Polychain and Three Arrows Capital are leading the investment. The Avalanche Foundation completed the private sale back in June 2021 and is disclosing it today.
Facebook is in the hot seat again. The Wall Street Journal published a powerful multi-part series on the company this week, drawing from internal documents on everything from the company’s secretive practice of whitelisting celebrities to its knowledge that Instagram is taking a serious toll on the mental health of teen girls. The flurry of
As companies process ever-increasing amounts of data, moving it in real time is a huge challenge for organizations. Confluent is a streaming data platform built on top of the open source Apache Kafka project that’s been designed to process massive numbers of events. To discuss this, and more, Confluent CEO and co-founder Jay Kreps will
Meet Liveblocks, a startup that has been working on a set of APIs so that it’s easier to build a collaborative product. Essentially, it lets you create multiplayer experiences on the web or in your app. The company started with a live presence state API. If you integrate this API in your product, it means