Ant Financial, the fintech company affiliated with Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, is continuing its global expansion. The firm has taken its first official step into Indonesia today after it announced a joint venture to develop local financial services. The company has partnered with conglomerate Emtek, Indonesia’s second largest media firm and an investor in -major e-commerce… Read More
Booster‘s tiny purple tankers have been cruising parking lots in Dallas-Fort Worth and the San Francisco area for 18 months now, and it’s ready to let the world in on its not-so-secret service. Companies can contract with Booster to have its employees’ gas tanks filled during the workday. When you arrive at work and pull into a parking space, if your employer is savvy enough… Read More
Darkstore, the startup that enables brands to offer same-day delivery, recently closed a $1.4 million seed round from PivotNorth — the same firm that led the seed round for same-day delivery darling Deliv. As part of the deal, PivotNorth CEO Tim Connors will join Darkstore’s board of directors. Thanks to the new funding, Darkstore will expand from just three markets to seven with… Read More
Indian health tech startup Lybrate has raised $3 million in new funding, according to a filing in the U.S., where it is incorporated.
Lybrate declined to comment on the filing, nor would it provide details of the investors who participated in the round.
Make what you will of that cagey response. The company last raised $10.2 million led by Tiger Global in July 2015, which is some time ago. Read More
Orbital Systems, a ‘clean-tech’ startup out of Sweden, has raised £15 million in Series B funding. The company’s founder and CEO Mehrdad Mahdjoubi has developed new re-purification technology, in collaboration with NASA, that significantly reduces the amount of water and energy used when taking a shower. The same technology can also be used to save water in other domestic… Read More
Qwilr, an Australian startup that helps companies turn boring PDFs and other static sales documents into attractive websites, has grabbed $1.5 million to develop its product and expand its global reach. Sydney-based Qwilr raised $500,000 from Sydney Seed Fund and Macdoch Ventures in 2015, but its new financing is provided by Germany’s Point Nine, a VC firm that specializes in… Read More
First Circle, a fintech startup enabling SME lending in the Philippines, has raised $1.3 million. The capital was provided by Accion Venture Lab, which is attached to finance-focused non-profit Accion, and Deep Blue Ventures. First Circle raised $1.2 million last year, and it counts 500 Startups, IMJ, and Key Capital among its backers. SME lending is a given in most Western countries, but… Read More
Zen Rooms, a budget hotel network targeted predominantly at Southeast Asia, has closed a $4.1 million Series A round to expand its presence in the region. The company, which was first founded by Rocket Internet in 2015, said the capital was provided by Korea’s Redbadge Pacific and SBI Investment Korea, with participation from existing investor Asia Pacific Internet Group, the joint… Read More
Walmart.com is preparing to launch a new feature called “Pickup Discount” that will lower the prices on up to one million online-only items if the customer chooses to pick up their order at a local store instead of opting for shipping. The feature is said to be inspired by the Smart Cart technology developed by Jet.com, the e-commerce startup Walmart acquired for $3 billion last year. Read More
Trade in that old dusty GoPro for credit toward a new one, Instagram combines ephemeral and permanent messaging and RetailMeNot gets acquired for $630 million. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Bixby isn’t saying “hello” quite yet. Samsung has confirmed to Axios that it will be shipping the Galaxy S8 without one of the device’s hallmark features, that being the voice part of its Bixby voice assistant. The digital assistant, which Samsung announced last month in conjunction with its newest smartphones, is a bit different than Siri or Google Now due to its… Read More
London-based Beamery has closed a $5 million Series A for its candidate relationship software. The round is led by Index Ventures, with participation from existing investors Edenred Capital Partners, GP Ventures and LocalGlobe. Read More
An all-electric Renault ZOE is writing fan fiction based on Jack Kerouac’s novel “On the Road” to demonstrate how far modern EVs can travel on a charge. It’s also a celebration of the novel’s sixtieth anniversary in 2017. Also, presumably, this will impress ZOE’s latest crush, who loves Beat literature. Read More
Rachel Whetstone, Uber’s head of communications and policy, is leaving the company, Recode reports. Uber has confirmed Whetstone’s departure to TechCrunch. “I am incredibly proud of the team that we’ve built — and that just as when I left Google, a strong and brilliant woman will be taking my place,” Whetstone said in a statement provided by Uber. Read More
Making the character models you see in games is a very involved process, and as a few recent titles have shown, the faces especially are hard as hell to do right. The folks behind Epic’s Unreal Engine, which powers more than a few of those games, have kindly offered a ‘photorealistic character sample’ — a Rob Lowe-looking dude who looks almost real enough to touch. Almost. Read More
Mark Twain once said that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. If Twilio provides any indication of what’s to come, we believe now more than ever in the future of the business-to-developer (B2D) space. As we reflect on 2016, Twilio’s IPO is a real highlight. Read More
Flybrix first dreamed up a drone that kids could build with LEGO bricks in 2015. At the time, the co-founders debated the merits of launching with a crowdfunding campaign. They craved the exposure that brands attracted on Kickstarter and Indiegogo, but they knew consumers were growing suspicious of promises made by crowdfunding hardware startups. Read More
We’re in town for a few days and we’re excited to meet all of you at the Pittsburgh Micro-Meetup tonight. In preparation for Disrupt New York and our upcoming TC Sessions series on robotics, John Biggs and I are in Pittsburgh to talk to some startups. Come out, chat and have some food and drinks compliments of our sponsors, Duolingo and TrueFit. We will meet at The Shop on April… Read More
The U.S. Air Force, working with Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works (which, as its name suggests, is its skunkworks operation) have demonstrated another round of flight capabilities for an autonomous F-16 fighter jet, which is meant to show what an eventual “Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle” (UCAV) could do using technology they’ve developed.
During this demonstration, the… Read More
