Become, the Israeli startup that operates a business lending marketplace to give SMBs more funding options, has closed $10 million in Series A investment. In addition, the company — formerly known has Lending Express — has raised $2.5 million in venture debt. The round is led by Benson Oak Ventures and Magenta Venture, with participation
Huge networks like Facebook and LinkedIn have a huge gravitational force in the world of social media — the size of their audiences make them important platforms for advertising and those who want information (for better or worse) to reach as many people as possible. But alongside their growth, we’re seeing a lasting role for
Google and NASA have demonstrated that quantum computing isn’t just a fancy trick, but almost certainly something actually useful — and they’re already working on commercial applications. What does that mean for existing startups and businesses? Simply put: nothing. But that doesn’t mean you can ignore it forever. There are three main points that anyone
Nearly a year and a half after the Cambridge Analytica scandal reportedly scuttled Facebook’s fledgling attempts to enter the healthcare market, the social media giant is launching a tool called “Preventive Health” to prompt its users to get regular checkups and connect them to service providers. The architect of the new service is Dr. Freddy
Datameer, the company that was born as a data prep startup on top of the open source Hadoop project, announced a $40 million investment and a big pivot away from Hadoop, while staying true to its big data roots. The investment was led by existing investor ST Telemedia . Other existing investors including Redpoint Ventures,
Think you have what it takes to be a TechCrunch hackathon champion? It’s time to put your creative code and confidence where your mouth is, my friends. Come to Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December and pit your skills, tenacity and endurance against some of the best creators from around the world. We’re limiting participation
Milieu Insight, a Singapore-based market research and data platform, announced today that it has raised $2.4 million in pre-A funding. The round, led by MassMutual Ventures Southeast Asia, will be used on product development and to launch in four new Southeast Asian countries, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. The startup’s platform, called Milieu Surveys,
TrueLayer, the London startup that’s built a developer API platform for fintechs and other adjacent companies to utilise open banking, has agreed a strategic and commercial relationship with Visa. The partnership sees Visa also take a minority stake in TrueLayer as part of the company’s $35 million Series C funding announced in June. The round
Apple just announced a new device today, the AirPods Pro. The company issued a press release to announce the new device. As the name suggests, the AirPods Pro are wireless earbuds with additional features compared to the AirPods. In particular, the AirPods Pro features active noise cancellation — this feature is particularly popular in headphones
A report by campaign group Avaaz examining how Facebook’s platform is being used to spread hate speech in the Assam region of North East India suggests the company is once again failing to prevent its platform from being turned into a weapon to fuel ethnic violence. Assam has a long-standing Muslim minority population but ethnic
Searchable.ai wants to solve an old problem around search in the enterprise. The stealthy startup announced a $2 million seed round. Defy Partners led the round with a slew of other participants including Paul English, co-founder of Kayak; Wayne Chang, co-founder of Crashlytics; Brian Halligan, co-founder and CEO of HubSpot; Jonathan Kraft, president and COO
Sourcing ingredients in the restaurant industry is a dirty process that still relies heavily on voicemails and fax orders. More tech-forward solutions have been pushed but getting restaurants and suppliers to uniformly sign on to a platform has been a relatively daunting challenge. Choco is a young startup with plenty of momentum that’s aiming to
Huge travel platforms that run airline booking systems like Sabre and Amadeus were invented eons ago and are so large and cumbersome that innovating with them is no easy feat. In the same way that challenger banks have come along to re-invent the banking software Starck, UK startup Duffel has done the same in the
As robots and gadgets continue to pervade our everyday lives, they increasingly need to see in 3D — but as evidenced by the notch in your iPhone, depth-sensing cameras are still pretty bulky. A new approach inspired by how some spiders sense the distance to their prey could change that. Jumping spiders don’t have room
Apple has released iOS 13.2 and iPadOS 13.2 for the iPhone and iPad. This update features the usual bug fixes and security improvements. But Apple is also adding a handful of new features to its operating system. First, iOS 13.2 brings a ton of new emojis. The company now officially supports Unicode 12.0. You can
Submit campaign ads to fact checking, limit microtargeting, cap spending, observe silence periods, or at least warn users. These are the solutions Facebook employees put forward in an open letter pleading with CEO Mark Zuckerberg and company leadership to address misinformation in political ads. The letter, obtained by the New York Times’ Mike Isaac, insists
The DoD JEDI contract saga came to a thrilling conclusion on Friday afternoon, appropriately enough, with one final plot twist. The presumptive favorite, Amazon did not win, stunning many, including likely the company itself. In the end, Microsoft took home the $10 billion prize. This contract was filled with drama from the beginning, given the
Building effective propulsion systems for satellites has traditionally been a highly bespoke affair, with expensive, one-off systems tailor-made to big, expensive spacecraft hardware. But increasingly, companies including startups are looking at ways to provide propulsion tech that can scale with the projected boom in demand for orbital satellites, including cube sats and small sats, as
The new all-electric Mini Cooper SE, the first Mini designed from the ground up as an electric car, is going to retail in the U.S. starting at $29,900 (plus an $850 Destination and Handling fee) – before any tax incentives are applied. That puts final pricing as low as around $17,900 when you consider cereal
Identity Verification-as-a-Service (“IVAAS”?!) is a pretty tortuous phrase. But it’s now established as key tech area for the tech industry as startups like Onfido, Jumio and others have proved with large funding raises in the last few years. Verifying ID is now also a key part of the gig-economy. Joining them today is a German
According to Reuters, Google parent Alphabet is looking to acquire publicly traded wearables company Fitbit. Reuters says the deal is still being negotiated and could still fall apart, but if it came together, it would surely strengthen Google’s position in the wearables space, an area where it has struggled despite its efforts around smartwatches and
Instagram has expanded a ban on graphical self-harm imagery to include a broader range of content depicting suicide, including fictional illustrations of self-harm and suicide methods such as drawings, cartoons and memes. “This past month, we further expanded our policies to prohibit more types of self-harm and suicide content. We will no longer allow fictional
Kandji, a new Apple MDM solution that promises to go far beyond Apple’s base MDM protocol and other solutions on the market, emerged from stealth today with a $3.375 million seed investment. The product is also publicly available for the first time starting today. The round, which closed in March, was led by First Round
French startup Welcome to the Jungle has raised a new $22.3 million funding round (€20 million). The startup is both a media company and a tech startup that wants to empower tech companies when it comes to recruitment. It doesn’t find the right candidate for you, it helps you get exposure, track application and facilitate
Koyo, a fintech startup using open banking to offer loans to people with “thin” credit files and currently poorly served by the market, has closed $4.9 million in funding. The round — a mixture of debt and equity funding — is led by Forward Partners, with participation from Seedcamp. Other investors include Christian Faes (founder
Weave, a developer of patient communications software focused on the dental and optometry market, was the first Utah-headquartered company to graduate from Y Combinator in 2014. Now, it’s poised to enter a small but growing class startups in the ‘Silicon Slopes’ to garner ‘unicorn’ status. The business announced a $70 million Series D last week
A new space race is forming globally, energized by venture capital and the hype around companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. The privately-funded space industry is still in its infancy, but there has been an explosion of startups and investors in the sector, and the fever has, in the last few
As the market continues to turn against the wave of highly valued venture-backed startups operating with little end in sight to their huge losses — Uber and WeWork being two prime examples — another startup is taking a proactive step to get ahead of the story, by cutting costs and restructuring before public opinion forces
Zamna — which uses a blockchain to securely share and verify data between airlines and travel authorities to check passenger identities — has raised a $5m seed funding round led by VC firms LocalGlobe and Oxford Capital, alongside Seedcamp, the London Co-Investment Fund (LCIF), Telefonica, and a number of angel investors. Participation has also come
A couple of years ago, the co-founder and CEO of a blood-testing company was publicly taken to task for implying in articles and professional profiles that he has a PhD, when, in reality, he’d left a prestigious graduate group three years after enrolling, without a degree. The CEO is hardly alone in intentionally or otherwise