The newly resurrected Gowalla wants to realize its mobile dreams from the early-aughts in an augmented reality world, and they’ve raised some new funding to make it happen. The AR startup tells TechCrunch that it has raised $4 million in seed funding co-led by Google’s venture arm GV and Spark Capital. Other investors include Niantic, […]
Cybersecurity startup CybSafe, a “behavioral security” platform, has raised $7.9 million in a Series A funding round led by IQ Capital with participation from Hanover Digital Investments (HDI) GmbH and B8 Ventures. The investment round will be used to focus on expanding its enterprise and midmarket client base. CybSafe is a SaaS product with a […]
New numbers from Canalys show a slowing in the major smartphone decline we saw for 2020. The past year was, of course, a major blow to an industry already suffering a slide. Hope that the arrival of 5G would right the ship were dashed by Covid-19. Things are looking up, fueled in large part by […]
General Motors pledged to be carbon neutral by 2040 — removing emissions from all of its products and global operations or offsetting those emissions through carbon credits or carbon capture within the next two decades. The company also committed to have a fully electric fleet of vehicles by 2035. It’s a big step for a […]
Storetasker is an online marketplace focused on connecting Shopify merchants with developers and other experts who can help grow their business. The product is now owned by the startup previously known as Lorem. Co-founder and COO Charlie Fogarty explained that while Lorem originally had a broader mission of connecting small businesses and developers, “We realized […]
The GameStop mania didn’t just drive up the stock price of a declining video game retailer, it’s also sent trading apps and others to the top of the App Store, due to record-breaking downloads. Today, the popular trading app Robinhood has become the No. 1 app overall on the App Store for the first time, […]
Facebook’s self-regulatory ‘Oversight Board’ (FOB) has delivered its first batch of decisions on contested content moderation decisions almost two months after picking its first cases. A long time in the making, the FOB is part of Facebook’s crisis PR push to distance its business from the impact of controversial content moderation decisions — by creating […]
Workday started the work day with some big news today. It’s acquiring employee feedback platform Peakon for $700 million in cash. One thing we have learned during the pandemic is that organizations need to find new ways to build stronger connections with their employees, and that’s precisely what Peakon provides. “Bringing Peakon into the Workday […]
A new type of neural network that’s capable of adapting its underlying behavior after the initial training phase could be the key to big improvements in situations where conditions can change quickly – like autonomous driving, controlling robots, or diagnosing medical conditions. These so-called ‘liquid’ neural networks were devised by MIT Computer Science and Artificial […]
Indian startup Shopalyst has officially launched a new platform that it calls the Discovery Commerce Cloud, which it says can help brands take full advantage of digital advertising. Co-founder and CEO Girish Ramachandra told me that Shopalyst was created to allow for “one seamless journey for the shopper” across advertising and e-commerce — something he […]
The venture potential of a startup that caters to individual students — instead of a slow-moving, small-pocketed institution — has a bullish aura that attracts investors. Add in a pandemic that forced many to embrace remote learning overnight, and it makes sense that we have seen companies like Outschool and ClassDojo turn first profits while […]
Buy now, pay later services — which let consumers finance the purchase of goods online by paying back the total in installments over time — have been growing in ubiquity this past year. Today, Scalapay, one of the companies that’s building a platform to enable buy now, pay later (BNPL) and related features, has raised […]
Update: Robinhood has made public note of the changes, stating that “in light of recent volatility” it is “restricting transactions for certain securities to position closing only, including $AMC, $BB, $BBBY, $EXPR, $GME, $KOSS, $NAKD and $NOK.” The company added that it has “raised margin requirements for certain securities.” Robinhood, the popular consumer trading application, […]
Last night, Qualtrics priced its IPO at $30 per share, selling 50.4 million shares in the process. Notably, the company’s IPO price was harder to chase down than usual, with a formal press release in scarce supply. SEC filings indicate that the company “anticipate[s]” a price of $30 per share, and reports from media and […]
UCLA researchers have been awarded a $3.65 million grant to collect, contextualize, and digitally preserve a huge archive of materials relating to policing and mass incarceration. It should help historians and anthropologists, but more fundamentally it will thoroughly document a period that many would rather forget. The “Archiving the Age of Mass incarceration” effort is […]
San Jose-based robotics company Fetch unveiled its latest robot this morning. The PalletTransport1500 is an autonomous bot designed specifically to replace forklift uses in warehouses. The systems, which are designed to pick up and delivery pallets, are capable of sporting payloads of up to 2,504 pounds. The device joins a number of different robotic forklift […]
Boxed, the New York-based online retailer that sells and delivers bulk-sized groceries, makes its foray into Asia by partnering with Aeon, one of Asia’s largest brick-and-mortar retail operators. Unlike its consumer-focused business in the U.S., which has been described as “Costco for millennials,” Boxed is exporting its nascent software-as-a-service solution to Aeon in Malaysia. As […]
As we move deeper into a cloud-centric world, everything was supposed to get easier, but in truth there’s a lot of moving parts, and companies need help getting everything to work. This takes people with a particular set of skills to help clients with tasks like integrations, managing hybrid and multi-cloud environments and getting data […]
New wellness startup Heights is formally launching this week, focusing on a category it describes as ‘braincare’. The startup will market “ultra high quality, sustainable plant-based supplements that feed your brain” based on what it says is scientific data. It has raised a $2 million Seed funding round (£1.7M) via the Seedrs crowdfunding platform, with the […]
