Prevailing wisdom states that as an enterprise SaaS company evolves, there’s a tendency to sacrifice profitability for growth — understandably so, especially in the early days of the company. At some point, however, a company needs to become profitable. Box has struggled to reach that goal since going public in 2015, but yesterday, it delivered
Joe Procopio Contributor Joe is a multi-exit, multi-failure entrepreneur. Joe is currently building Spiffy, and previously sold Automated Insights, sold ExitEvent, and built Intrepid Media. Find more about Joe at joeprocopio.com or @jproco on Twitter. More posts by this contributor Here’s what happens when you decide to sell your startup Are you considering selling your
Chefclub hasn’t attracted a lot of headlines over the years as it has only raised $3.5 million. But it is slowly building a major media brand on social media platforms as it now competes directly with Tastemade and Tasty. Compared to more traditional recipe websites and brands, Chefclub focuses exclusively on the intersection of food
Science is exciting in theory, but it can also be dreadfully dull. Some experiments require hundreds or thousands of repetitions or trials — an excellent opportunity to automate. That’s just what MIT scientists have done, creating a robot that performs a certain experiment, observes the results, and plans a follow-up… and has now done so
A new app called Fabric aims to make it simpler for parents to plan for their family’s long-term financial well-being. The goal is to offer parents a one-stop-shop that includes the ability to ability for term life insurance from their phone, create a free will in about five minutes, and collaborate with a spouse or
Vivun, a startup that wants to help companies keep better track of pre-sales data announced a $3 million seed round today led by Unusual Ventures, the venture firm run by Harness CEO Jyoti Bansal. Vivun founder and CEO Matt Darrow says that pre-sales team works more closely with the customer than anyone else, delivering demos
Gorgias, a startup offering artificial intelligence tools for customer service and support, is announcing that it has raised $14 million in Series A funding. Co-founder and CEO Romain Lapeyre told me that the startup (whose name is pronounced “gorgeous”) is taking advantage of a broader shift as brands are looking to sell directly to consumers,
Amazon helped pioneer and now dominates the online marketplace business model, where a variety of merchants post items for sale on its platform for billions of consumers to discover and buy them. Today, a London startup that’s taken that idea but is applying it to a far more curated set of retailers and goods has
A joint investigation by watchdogs in Canada and British Columbia has found that Cambridge Analytica-linked data firm, Aggregate IQ, broke privacy laws in Facebook ad-targeting work it undertook for the official Vote Leave Brexit campaign in the UK’s 2016 EU referendum. A quick reminder: Vote Leave was the official leave campaign in the referendum on the
Coralogix, a startup that wants to bring automation and intelligence to logging, announced a $10 million Series A investment today. The round was led by Aleph with participation from StageOne Ventures, Janvest Capital Partners and 2B Angels. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $16.2 million, according to the company. CEO and co-founder Ariel Assaraf
The New York Stock Exchange filed paperwork this morning with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to allow companies to raise capital as part of a direct listing. Direct listings are a way for companies to go public by selling existing shares held by insiders, employees and investors directly to the market, rather than the
Jason Sherman, founder and CEO of TapRm (pronounced “taproom”), says it’s time for beer-lovers to do more of their shopping online. It’s an industry that Sherman knows well, having worked as an attorney at Anheuser Busch and at the alcohol giant’s ZX Ventures incubator. He said it was through the job that he began wondering
Xerox fired the latest volley in the Xerox –HP merger letter wars today. Xerox CEO John Visentin wrote to the HP Board that his company planned to take its $33.5 billion offer directly to HP shareholders. He began his letter with hostile tone befitting a hostile takeover attempt, stating that their refusal to negotiate defied
You may have heard the pitch before, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram aren’t homes for your real friends anymore because they’re too big, too commercial and too influencer-y, the result is that your most important relationships have been relegated to the lowest common denominator tool on your phones: your texting app. Cocoon, a startup from a
The Valley’s affinity for robotics shows no signs of cooling. Technical enhancements through innovations like AI/ML, compute power and big data utilization continue to drive new performance milestones, efficiencies and use cases. Despite the old saying, “hardware is hard,” investment in the robotics space continues to expand. Money is pouring in across robotics’ billion-dollar sub
Who could have guessed an adorable, big-eyed baby Star Wars alien would have generated a ton of demand for toys? Apparently not Disney, which today started to sell merchandise based on The Child from new Disney+ show The Mandalorian, commonly known as “Baby Yoda”. The shirts, bags, mugs, and phone cases all feel…forced, like Disney
You’ve probably heard murmurs about Google’s forthcoming Ambient Mode for Android . The company first announced this feature, which essentially turns an Android device into a smart display while it’s charging, in September. Now, in a Twitter post, Google confirmed that it will launch soon, starting with a number of select devices that run Android
Why are we all trapped in enterprise chat apps if we talk 6X faster than we type, and our brain processes visual info 60,000X faster than text? Thanks to Instagram, we’re not as camera-shy anymore. And everyone’s trying to remain in flow instead of being distracted by multi-tasking. That’s why now is the time for
Today, Amazon announced a new approach that it says will put machine learning technology in reach of more developers and line of business users. Amazon has been making a flurry of announcements ahead of its re:Invent customer conference next week in Las Vegas. While the company offers plenty of tools for data scientists to build
Seventeen, lieblings. That’s how many days stand between you and Disrupt Berlin 2019, which takes place on 11-12 December. Here’s a pro tip for savvy investors. Use this time to jumpstart your networking strategy and make the most of your two days at Disrupt. How? We have a plan for that. More on that in
Leavy.co, the Paris-born startup that offers a travel app for millennials to help them travel more without getting into further debt, has quietly raised $14 million in funding. The investment — which is pegged as a seed round and actually closed in January! — is led by Dutch investor Prime Ventures, with participation from angel
Artiphon, the startup that previously raised more than $1 million on Kickstarter for a device called the Instrument 1, has launched a new campaign for its latest invention, Orba. Co-founder and CEO Mike Butera said the Instrument 1 and Orba share “the same DNA,” namely his vision to help music-making become more accessible to everyone,
In some corners, the smartphone market is showing its first signs of life in some time. Recent figures from Canalys indicate a small but notable uptick in the European market as shipments grew 3%, year-over-year in Q3. The analyst firm put global growth at 1% globally in another recent report. Generally, such numbers wouldn’t warrant
Keegan Walden Contributor Keegan Walden, Ph.D, is the Co-founder & COO of Torch, a leadership development software platform. He is also a psychologist with a B.A. from Yale University and a Ph.D. from Northwestern University. My co-founder and I go to couples therapy. Our partnership is not romantic — we’re both married to other people
Huawei and Devialet have unveiled a new speaker specifically designed for the Chinese market, the Huawei Sound X. French startup Devialet has been looking at ways to license its technology and patents to consumer electronics manufacturers, such as Sky, Iliad, Altice USA and Renault. While Devialet only sells very premium speakers under its own brand,
Establishing an enduring presence on the Moon will mean making a lot of landings — and NASA researchers want to make those landings as reliable and cheap as possible. This robotic “pallet lander” concept would be a dead simple (as lunar landers go) way to put up to 300 kilograms of rover and payload onto
Europe bucked global smartphone stagnation in the third quarter, marking an 8% year over year growth in device shipments. That number, provided by Canalys, puts the region at the top of smartphone growth figures, beating out Asia/Pacific’s six percent. Once again, Samsung was the biggest winner here. The Korean manufacturer saw a healthy 26%, year
Instagram has posted an article describing the behind-the-scenes machinery that fills the Explore tab in Instagram with new, interesting stuff every time you open it. It’s a bit technical, so here are five takeaways. Even Instagram and Facebook have limited resources Unlike the feed, which some still would prefer was simply chronological, the Explore tab
AWS today announced a number of IoT-related updates that, for the most part, aim to make getting started with its IoT services easier, especially for companies that are trying to deploy a large fleet of devices. The marquee announcement, however, is about the Alexa Voice Service, which makes Amazon’s Alex voice assistant available to hardware
Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover has raised another $10 million to invest in nascent upstarts via Weekend Fund. The news represents the firm’s second fundraise after a $3 million debut angel fund that closed in 2017. Hoover, an investor in Girlboss, audio social media platform TTYL and mobile application performance software company Headspin, founded Product Hunt