Tesla will be added to the S&P 500, a milestone that will expand its investor base and put the electric automaker in the same company as heavyweights like Apple, Berkshire Hathaway and Microsoft. The announcement, made Monday afternoon by the S&P Dow Jones Indices, sent shares 13.7% higher in after-market trading. Tesla will officially join the benchmark […]
After giving in to the looming threat of subpoenas, two of tech’s most high profile CEOs will again be grilled by Congress. On Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will host Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg for what’s likely to be another multi-hour airing of assorted grievances. In this round, Republican lawmakers called the […]
After a tumultuous year for the travel industry, Airbnb’s long-awaited IPO filing just dropped. One thing is clear: there is still plenty of juice left in the home-sharing platform, and a smattering of VCs and the company’s founders are positioned to receive some serious returns. My colleague Alex Wilhelm has an overview article on Airbnb’s […]
Baidu said on Monday it is acquiring Joyy’s live-streaming service YY Live in China for $3.6 billion in an all-cash deal as the Chinese internet giant makes a further push to diversify beyond its core search business and play catch-up in video entertainment. The announcement, which Baidu shared on the sidelines of its quarterly earnings, […]
Airbnb filed to go public today, bringing the well-known unicorn one step closer to being a public company. The financial results show a company on the rebound, but smaller than it was. Its more granular financial results also make clear how hard the pandemic was on the travel-reliant unicorn. Regarding Airbnb’s worth, investors will have […]
Ride Vision, an Israeli startup that is building an AI-driven safety system to prevent motorcycle collisions, today announced that it has raised a $7 million Series A round led by crowdsourcing platform OurCrowd. YL Ventures, which typically specializes in cybersecurity startups but also led the company’s $2.5 million seed round in 2018, Mobilion VC and […]
Beyond Meat has launched two new versions of its Beyond Burgers, the company announced today. The two new options will be available on store shelves in 2021, but will be on offer at a two-day pop-up event in Los Angeles for folks to try. The new Beyond Burger patties are designed to mirror the options […]
Colleges are diving into esports, with 115 different programs offering scholarships for esports and club programs are growing even faster. Certainly, it will help attract students, but monetization is really tricky.
Deep Vision, a new AI startup that is building an AI inferencing chip for edge computing solutions, is coming out of stealth today. The six-year-old company’s new ARA-1 processors promise to strike the right balance between low latency, energy efficiency and compute power for use in anything from sensors to cameras and full-fledged edge servers. […]
It’s price-hike season! Just a few weeks after Netflix bumped up prices on a bunch of its plans, it looks like Hulu will soon be charging more for its Live TV service. The company has confirmed to us that it will be bumping the monthly cost of Hulu + Live from $54.99 to $64.99 as […]
Here’s a closer look at the three growth marketing tactics I credit with helping us scale Lifesum over the last 36 months. It’s a strategy any startup can use, regardless of size or budget.
Arrikto, a startup that wants to speed up the machine learning development lifecycle by allowing engineers and data scientists to treat data like code, is coming out of stealth today and announcing a $10 million Series A round. The round was led by Unusual Ventures, with Unusual’s John Vrionis joining the board. “Our technology at […]
Apple is making it easier to discover and listen to podcasts via the web. The company announced today an Apple Podcasts embed web player is now available, allowing anyone — including creators, listeners or marketers — to generate embed codes for the more than 1.5 million shows available across the Apple Podcasts service. The codes […]
GitHub has restored the code of a project that the RIAA demanded it take down last month after finding that the group’s DMCA complaint was meritless. YouTube-dl, a tool that lets videos from the streaming site be downloaded for offline viewing, is back in action — and GitHub is changing its policy and earmarking a […]
Activity and fitness tracking platform Strava has raised $110 million in new funding, in a Series F round led by TCV and Sequoia, and including participation by Dragoneer group, Madrone Capital Partners, Jackson Square Ventures and Go4it Capital. The funding will be used to propel the development of new features, and expand the company’s reach […]
Squarespace is adding a new monetization option for websites built on the platform: Member Areas, where businesses can charge for access to exclusive content. Chief Product Officer Paul Gubbay said that particularly in the midst of the pandemic, businesses on Squarespace “want to experiment with different ways to make money.” They can already use the […]
Federal regulators have approved Mastercard’s acquisition of Salt Lake City-based startup Finicity, which provides open-banking APIs. The deal is expected to go for $825 million. “We were notified that the Department of Justice completed its review of our planned acquisition of Finicity and has cleared it to move forward,” Mastercard wrote in a statement. “We […]
WildWorks, the gaming company that makes the popular kids game Animal Jam, has confirmed a data breach. Animal Jam is one of the most popular games for kids, ranking in the top five games in the 9-11 age category in Apple’s App Store in the U.S., according to data provided by App Annie. But while […]
As companies work with data, one of the big obstacles they face is making sure they are not exposing personally identifiable information (PII) or other sensitive data. It usually requires a painstaking manual effort to strip out that data. Gretel, an early-stage startup, wants to change that by making it faster and easier to anonymize […]