If you’re more of a Gmail power user (or even semi-power user) and other email services geared toward work, you’ve probably installed plenty of plugins like Rapportive to make your job a little bit easier. And while it’s all fine to try to pull together a suite of plugins to make that a little bit easier, a startup called Polymail is hoping to rope that all into a single hub… Read More
Actress Maisie Williams, best known for her role as Arya Stark on Game of Thrones, is the latest celeb to venture into tech entrepreneurship, with the launch of a new company aimed at connecting creatives, called Daisie. Available later this summer as a mobile app, Daisie will offer a platform where creators can network, like, share and collaborate on projects within a social networking… Read More
Not every self-driving car has to be able to move passengers from point A to point B. Take, for example, Nuro: The startup just revealed their unique autonomous vehicle platform, which is more of a mobile small logistics platform than a self-driving car. The company, which has been working away in stealth mode in Mountain View until now, has raised a $92 million Series A round led by Banyan… Read More
Bench, the TechStars-backed bookkeeping service for SMBs, has today announced the close of an $18 million B-1 funding round led by iNovia Capital. Existing investors, including Bain Capital Ventures, Altos Ventures, and Silicon Valley Bank, also participated in the round. Bench first launched out of TechStars NYC in 2012. Back then, the company was called 10Sheet, and it aimed to providing… Read More
What should we do about token sales? Two days ago a Lithuanian “company” called Prodeum looked like a promising if silly blockchain startup. Their stated goal? To track every piece of food on the Internet. While I doubt many of us will care about the exact provenance of the orange we just ate, we could see, in some distant future, a need for this sort of tracking. After all, the… Read More
If you’re like me, and I’m going to assume you are for the purposes of this post, you like the idea of time tracking, but generally it’s a bit too fiddly or complicated. TimeFlip is a super-simple gadget that lets you easily track how much time you spend on different activities just by flipping it around. Read More
What if you could look down and see your actual arms and legs inside VR, or look at other real-world people or objects as if you weren’t wearing a headset? Imverse’s team spent five years building this incredible technology at universities in Switzerland and Spain. “We were working on this before Oculus was even created” says co-founder Javier Bello Ruiz. Now its… Read More
JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway have joined forces with Amazon to form a new healthcare company for all U.S. employees. Right now details are so sparse that there’s not even a name associated with the new company. However, this is big news for the industry and could possibly have ramifications not only for health insurance giants, but for also smaller tech companies that are open… Read More
As Pinterest increasingly tries to sell itself as a startup specialized in computer vision that it plugs into visual discovery, it’s continuing to pick up additional pieces to help continue to build that out. Today, the company said it is hiring former Google computer vision research lead Chuck Rosenberg, who was previously at Google for 14 years. Pinterest sees more than 300 million… Read More
Heptio holds a special place in the Kubernetes startup ecosystem. Its co-founders are, after all, two of the co-founders of the Kubernetes project. Heptio has raised millions, but it was never clear what their business plan looked like beyond offering training and professional services. It’s becoming clearer now, as the company today announced the launch of the Heptio Kubernetes… Read More
Want to put your money in something like a 1955 Porsche or 1985 Ferrari but don’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend? Meet Rally Road. The New York-based startup lets investors buy a real equity stake in a classic car for as little as $50. The company just closed a $2.9M seed round led by Columbus Nova with participation from Social Leverage and other angel… Read More
The SoftBank Vision Fund has struck again. This time, it’s investing $300 million in on-demand walking and dog care startup Wag. Wag has also brought on Hilary Schneider, formerly of identity theft protection company LifeLock, to serve as the company’s new chief executive officer. Wag, which launched back in 2015, offers on-demand walking and boarding for pups. The startup… Read More
Mammoth Media has raised a $13 million Series A funding to create what it calls “entertainment experiences for the mobile-first generation.” Mammoth isn’t not the first startup to pitch itself as reinventing entertainment for smartphones, but for the most part, that message has come from gaming companies. Co-founder and CEO Benoit Vatere said he wanted to take the… Read More
Warby Parker has been around for seven years, but today the company is finally unveiling a new product category. In a 12-week pilot program, Warby Parker is now offering kids’ frames to folks in the NYC area. The company is pulling from some of its most popular frames, shrinking them down to fit kids 8 years and up (Jr.) and kids ages 4-7 (Jr. Jr.). But why not go big with the launch… Read More
As the founder of the Google Brain deep learning project and co-founder of Coursera, Andrew Ng was one of the most recognizable names in the machine learning community when he became Baidu’s chief scientist in 2014. He left there in early 2017 and launched a number of new AI projects. What he was really working on, though, was his AI Fund. Read More
American Express announced today that it has acquired Mezi, the AI-based virtual travel assistant, for an undisclosed amount. After the deal closes, Mezi will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of American Express. Its technology is already powering AskAmex, a personal concierge app for cardholders that launched its pilot program last year. Read More
When you reach BlaBlaCar’s scale, you need to find customers who are hard to reach — literally. The French company announced an effort to optimize its ride-sharing for long-distance rides for people who don’t live in major hubs. BlaBlaCar now has 60 million users. When you list a ride on BlaBlaCar, you tell the service where you’re coming from and where you’re going. Read More
Mahjoubi joined Emmanuel Macron’s team as the person in charge of all things digital while Macron was campaigning to become France’s President. He joined the French government immediately after the 2017 election and has been in charge of Digital Affairs. In addition to being the go-to policymaker for the tech industry in general, he’s also working on digital initiatives… Read More
French startup Spendesk just raised $9.9 million (€8 million) from Index Ventures with Michael Benabou, Laurent Asscher and Showpad cofounders Louis Jonckheere and Pieterjan Bouten also participating. Spendesk is a service that combines prepaid cards with an expense report solution. After signing up, each employee receives a personal card. Companies can top up their global Spendesk account… Read More
The address book is the last, worst default app you rely on. It’s time it got as smart as the rest of our phones. That’s the idea behind SuperPhone. Email isn’t how you build relationships anymore. Yet most business software sanctifies the spammy inbox when it’s the immediacy of text messaging that keeps people in touch today. Musician Ryan Leslie learned that when… Read More
In the latest chapter of GAFAM’s continuing bid to conquer online gaming, Microsoft has acquired PlayFab which helps game developers launch their titles online more quickly with simplified backend services. The startup will be integrated into Microsoft’s Azure gaming group. The Seattle-based startup had raised around $13 million in funding from investors. Terms of the deal… Read More
Boeing’s HorizonX is the aerospace company’s vehicle for making investments in promising next-generation startups and technology, and it just placed its latest bet: funding in Cuberg, a Berkeley-based battery tech startup that has a founding team including Stanford University researchers. Battery tech is still one of the most frustrating roadblocks any company encounters when trying… Read More
Brooklyn-based startup LittleBits has worked hard to shake the “tech toy” label. While the company’s done a good job getting its kid-friendly engineering kits into the hands of schools, a new partnership with Pearson will certainly add an extra bit of legitimacy to the company’s methods. The education publishing giant announced this week that it’s… Read More
As data privacy becomes an increasingly important notion, especially with the EU’s GDPR privacy laws coming online in May, companies need to find ways to understand their customer’s private data. BigID thinks it has a solution and it landed a $14 million Series A investment today to help grow the idea. Comcast Ventures, SAP (via SAP.io), ClearSky Security Fund and one of the… Read More
Bodle Technologies is a startup spun out of Oxford University, that is developing a new type of ‘reflective’ display technology that promises to use a lot less power. In fact, in some states the screen tech may require almost no power at all. Read More
One of the great entrepreneurs of the 20th century, Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, passed away today. As Reuters pointed out in its short biography, Kamprad created a store — as a teenager mind you — that today has more than 400 locations, revenues of $62 billion, and a cultural ubiquity that very few consumer products could ever hope to attain. Having read the IKEA story… Read More
Dental care can be costly and hard to access, especially if you live in a rural community or a third-world country. In fact, the biggest barrier to dental care is cost. This is according to the American Dental Association, which says many rural areas lack access to dental professionals. Read More
HQ Trivia, the number one trivia app in the Apple App Store, has removed the minimum $20 balance to cash out. The company made the announcement earlier today on Twitter. Because the prize money is divvied out among sometimes hundreds of winners, people don’t often walk away with much money from a single game. Up until now, that has meant people were left with less than $20 in their… Read More
Detroit-based Floyd has announced a $5.6 million Series A funding round that will let the company expand its operations and release new products. The company has been in Detroit for the last five years and they’re dedicated to creating better furniture and a better experience around furniture. This injection of cash should go a long way in helping that mission. Floyd launched its… Read More
French startup Heetch has an ambitious goal. The company wants to become the second ride-sharing service in France and in the other European countries where it operates. The startup just raised $20 million from Félix Capital, Via ID, Alven Capital and Idinvest Partners. In order to stay competitive with Uber, Heetch is a bit cheaper than a normal UberX ride. But drivers still get paid more… Read More
French startup Blade, the company behind Shadow, is launching its cloud gaming service in the U.K. Just like in the U.S., the company is starting with a pre-sale before accepting all customers. For a flat monthly fee, you can rent a gaming PC in a data center near you. You can then access this beefy computer using desktop and mobile apps as well as the company’s own little box. Read More
Similar to Uber’s “God View” scandal, Lyft staffers have been abusing customer insight software to view the personal contact info and ride history of the startup’s passengers. One source that formerly worked with Lyft tells TechCrunch that widespread access to the company’s backend let staffers “see pretty much everything including feedback, and yes, pick up… Read More
It’s over. Benchmark’s lawsuit against former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has now been dropped, ending one of the biggest VC-founder disputes in history. It was dismissed as a condition of the SoftBank investment in Uber getting done. The deal was completed earlier this month, giving both Benchmark and Kalanick an opportunity to sell a significant Uber stake. The venture firm and… Read More
First Round Capital’s Dorm Room Fund just released VCWiz, a tool to help founders find investors and raise money from them. The platform is one part VC directory and one part CRM tool, essentially letting you find the best investors for your startup then begin the process of reaching out to them. New users input some basic information about their startup including a description, industry… Read More
No-commission stock trading app Robinhood will let you buy and sell Bitcoin and Ethereum without any added transaction fees starting in February, compared to Coinbase’s 1.5 to 4 percent fees in the US. And as of today Robinhood will let all users track the price, news, and set up alerts on those and 14 other top crypto coins, including Litecoin and Ripple. “We’re planning… Read More
Ex-hacker Eric Taylor, also known as CosmoTheGod, and another infosec name, Bryant Townsend have colorful pasts. Most recently Taylor stole the social security and personal records of a number of high-ranking Obama administration officials, posting it on a site called exposed.su. Townsend, for his part, was caught up in a denial of service hack that led back to his former DDoS mitigation company. Read More
Meet Cozy, a French startup that wants to completely rethink how cloud services work. The startup first launched a Dropbox-like competitor to store, synchronize and share all your files. Now, the company wants to go one step further and create an ecosystem of open-source services that respect your privacy. When I met with Cozy co-founder and CEO Benjamin André earlier this week, he was fed… Read More
Logan Paul, the YouTuber who sparked a public backlash three weeks ago after posting a video in Japan’s “suicide forest,” has returned to the platform. In his first post back, he published a video focused on suicide and self-harm prevention. Read More
Meet Setapp, the Spotify of Mac apps. If you pay $9.99 per month, you can download and use more than a hundred Mac apps without spending another cent. All those apps are usually paid apps, but Setapp wants to change the model. Setapp was founded by MacPaw, an independent Mac development company based in Ukraine. While they have been developing their own apps for almost ten years,… Read More
Tigera, a San Francisco-based startup that helps businesses connect and secure their container-based applications, today announced that it has raised an additional $10 million in a funding round led by Madrona Venture Group, with participation from New England Associates (NEA) and Wing Venture Capital. Madrona managing partner Soma Somasegar will join the company’s board of directors.… Read More
In what amounts to faint praise for the strength physical book NPD reported that print book sales rose 1.9 percent in 2017, less than the 3 percent growth posted in 2013-2016. NPD tracks book sales in the US. They write: “Returning from the huge sales of ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’ in 2016, and the rise of adult coloring books, last year’s book sales growth was… Read More
ContentSquare, which offers cloud-based software that helps businesses understand how and why users are interacting with their app, mobile and web sites, has picked up $42 million in Series B funding. 
Brainly, the edtech startup founded out of Poland but now with a HQ in New York, has acquired Bask to add video to its peer-to-peer learning platform. 