Pear, a popular seed-stage venture firm whose early bets include Guardant Health, Memebox, and Branch, hosted its fourth demo day in Woodside, Ca., last Thursday, and though it was a scorchingly hot afternoon at a largely outdoor venue, a veritable who’s who of VCs showed up: Bryan Schreier of Sequoia Capital was there. So was Brian O’Malley of Accel Partners, another frequent guest. Read More
We only have to look at the top three most competitive countries to understand what’s driving economic growth for their businesses and prosperity for their citizens; the common thread is aggressive adoption of automation.
These countries consider robots the fuel that will ignite business growth, enable humans to do more productive and meaningful work, and expand overall economies. Read More
It’s rare to see a tech company report higher than a ten percent black employee population, but that’s what Atlanta-based Rubicon Global just did. The trash and recycling company, which has raised $220 million in venture funding, touts some above-average representation of black employees, reporting 25 percent of its employee base is black. Rubicon Global does not haul trash… Read More
The hackathon at Disrupt SF 2017 is so close we can almost taste it. Soon, thousands of investors, founders and tech enthusiasts will flock to San Francisco’s Pier 48 for the best startup show in the Bay Area. We’re thrilled to announce that the next wave of tickets to the hackathon is available, and you can get your free hackathon ticket here. Read More
About a month ago, Twitter rolled out a new feature that would show you a bunch of random shit in your notifications tab. For example, if a couple of people that you follow liked a tweet, it’d show up in your notifications tab. If someone followed someone else, boom! There it was in your notifications tab. If people you follow start tweeting about the same topic or article… well,… Read More
Still, Essential saw something missing in the now very mature smartphone market, and led by Android creator Andy Rubin, set out to address that gap.
The Essential Phone (PH-1 by technical model name) is the fruit of that labor, created by what seems like an impossibly small team, that number under 100 and for much of the device’s development, actually numbered far fewer. It’s an… Read More
Hospital logistics aren’t sexy, but they’re necessary to keep the place humming along during emergencies and to reduce errors and other costly issues. Qventus, a startup with a predictive intelligence software platform, is joining up with one of the largest hospital systems in the U.S., Sutter Health, to see if it can expedite Sutter’s pharmacy operations and hopefully save… Read More
GetAccept co-founder Mathias Thulin is very familiar with a common problem sales representatives have: they have a great meeting with a potential customer, fire off an email to follow up on that deal and send a thank you note, and then hear nothing back. With all these leads going dark, Thulin and his co-founder Samir Smajic wanted to dig into the data to figure out what was happening. To do… Read More
The company formerly known as Google — before it rebranded its “collection of companies” to Alphabet, in 2015, turning the main ad revenue business into a corporate unit wholly-owned by the parent entity — looks to have finally completed this process of business reorganization by forming a new holding company, called XXVI Holdings Inc. Read More
Remember the Lily drone? It was the drone a person could launch by throwing it in the air and then it would follow the user gallivanting around Dolores Park. It was also the company that couldn’t live up to its crowdfunding campaign and ultimately shut down last January. It’s now available. Sort of. It’s called the Lily Next-Gen and looks much like the original with a blue… Read More
Elon Musk celebrated Labor Day with a dark premonition: Countries competing to be the best when it comes to artificial intelligence technology could “likely” be the case of WW3, according to the prolific technologist and entrepreneur. Musk tweeted the sentiment on Monday, apparently inspired by recent events around North Korea and its apparent hydrogen bomb tests, as revealed by… Read More
As outsized ridesharing companies like Uber and Lyft continue to build out their taxi-style marketplaces largely based around connecting individual passengers to individual drivers, a startup focused squarely on the carpooling opportunity has raised a large round of funding to expand outside of the U.S. Via — which has developed a shuttle-based carpooling service that it offers directly… Read More
Xiaomi’s bezel-less Mi Mix smartphone grabbed a huge amount of attention when it launched last October. Now the Chinese phone maker is getting more opportunistic with the follow-up version, which it plans to unveil at an event in Beijing one day before Apple’s iPhone launch. The timing is perfect for Xiaomi. Its last device was a smash and there’s huge expectations on the… Read More
It is looking like a new era is coming for ICOs, at least those in China for now. In the U.S., the SEC has issued official warnings around the risks of ICOs, also known as token sales, but the Chinese government looks set to beat it to implementing regulation around the rapidly growing fundraising option. A notice from a committee led by China’s central bank [link in Chinese] today… Read More
China is streets ahead when it comes to digital payments. The latest leap is facial recognition technology that allows a customer to pay by literally flashing a smile. Alibaba’s Ant Financial affiliate launched the ‘smile to pay’ service in Hangzhou, the location of the company’s global HQ, where it is being trialled with KFC. As the video from Ant below shows, the… Read More
In the past year, New York has reached a tipping point as consumer-facing startups proliferate and similarly Los Angeles is gaining notice with the success of Snap and Dollar Shave Club among others. Read More
The benefits of Amazon’s $13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods more or less went live this week, with price cuts out the wazoo as well as a bunch of Amazon Echo devices available for sale in stores. With this massive move into grocery chains and the obvious branding play, as well as tangential benefits like suddenly getting access to hundreds of locations with fresh ingredients that… Read More
Tim Cook was among the top tech leaders who sat down with Trump ahead of inauguration in hopes of helping shape the new president’s tech policy. But like many of those who held a glimmer of hope for some post-election softening of campaign rhetoric, Apple’s CEO has found more than a few reasons to push back. In the wake of the violence in Charlottesville last month that ended in… Read More
Goodhart’s Law, as phrased by Mary Strathern: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Honored more in the breach than the observance, alas. Our algorithmic world has turned so many measures into targets, and by doing so ruined them. Let’s talk about just one example: let’s talk about books. “#1 Bestseller!” That’s a mark… Read More
Habito, a London startup that is bringing the entire mortgage process online, has raised £18.5 million in Series B funding. Atomico, the European VC firm founded by Skype’s Niklas Zennström, led the round. Read More
