Earlier this year, Apple officially discontinued Music Memos, an iPhone app that allowed musicians to quickly record audio and develop new song ideas. Now, a new startup called Tape It is stepping in to fill the void with an app that improves audio recordings by offering a variety of features, including higher-quality sound, automatic instrument […]
“Conversational AI” startup PolyAI, based out of London, has raised $14 million in a funding round led by Silicon Valley’s Khosla Ventures, with participation from existing investors (Point72 Ventures, Amadeus Capital, Sands Capital Ventures, Passion Capital and Entrepreneur First). This follows their $12 million Series A, and will provide resources for further U.S. expansion beyond […]
When you’re in the mood for a pep talk, who better to turn to than a well-networked, optimistic mentor who is naturally in your corner? That friendly shoulder is the role that “Masters of Scale” wants to play. Inspired by LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock partner Reid Hoffman’s hit podcast, the new book, co-authored by Hoffman […]
While farmland is among the oldest investment classes around, the average investor hasn’t had access to farmland the way that billionaires and institutional investors have. That's changing.
How can debt be stable and reliable? Seems like an oxymoron, but the reality is that while equity investors are looking for growth, debt investors just want to get paid back with interest.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has reacted strongly to the company’s current relationship with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. According to him, the SEC is threatening to sue the cryptocurrency exchange if it launches its yield-generating product called Coinbase Lend. With this new product, Coinbase wants to compete with popular decentralized finance (DeFi) products, such […]
Twitter is a useful place for following breaking news and keeping up with what the people you’re already interested in are doing, but its relative dearth of discovery features and a lack of organized community spaces make it pretty hard to connect with anyone you aren’t actively seeking out. The company is thinking about changing […]
The travel industry was one of the hardest hit by the pandemic, and startup Headout was no exception. A marketplace that let tourists make same-day bookings for tours, events and activities, the app expanded around the world after launching in 2015. Then COVID-19 hit. But business is growing again thanks to rebounds in domestic travel and […]
It’s been a wildly unprecedented year and a half by any metric. The pandemic has utterly transformed many industries and made or broken others. In the world of technology, however, few categories were as well positioned to embrace a changed world than connected fitness. The space was well on its way prior to the arrival […]
Koyo, a fintech startup using open banking to offer loans to people with poor credit histories, has closed a Series A funding round of $50 million in debt and equity led by Force Over Mass, with participation from existing investors Forward Partners, Frontline Ventures and Seedcamp. New investors in Koyo include Force Over Mass, Matt […]
A number of Spotify playlist curators are complaining that the streaming music company is not addressing the ongoing issue of playlist abuse, which sees bad actors reporting playlists that have gained a following in order to give their own playlists better visibility. Currently, playlists created by Spotify users can be reported in the app for […]
Private equity giant Thoma Bravo has taken a stake in Intel 471, a provider of cyberthreat intelligence for enterprises and governments. The strategic growth investment, which comes as organizations double down on cybersecurity amid a pandemic-fueled rise in cyber threats, will enable Intel 471 to evolve its product suite, broaden its go-to-market strategy and continue […]
Sila Nanotechnologies’ next-generation battery technology made its commercial product debut Wednesday in the new Whoop fitness tracker, a milestone that caps a decade of research and development by the Silicon Valley startup, all aimed at cracking the code to packing more energy into a cell at a lower cost. Billions have been spent over the […]
As companies try to navigate an ever-changing security landscape, it can be challenging to protect everything. Security startup TrueFort has built a zero trust solution focusing on protecting enterprise applications. Today, the company announced a $30 million Series B. Shasta Ventures led today’s round with participation from new firms Canaan and Ericsson Ventures along with […]
Never mind buying a robot dog for your kids — you might just get them a mythical creature instead. Chinese EV maker Xpeng has teased a robot unicorn meant for children to ride.
The U.K. government is preparing to spend over half a million dollars to encourage the development of detection technologies for child sexual exploitation material (CSAM) that can be bolted on to end-to-end encrypted messaging platforms to scan for the illegal material, as part of its ongoing policy push around internet and child safety. In a […]
Twitter announced yesterday that it’s testing a feature on the web that makes it possible to remove followers without blocking them. Sometimes, users want to stop a follower from seeing their tweets without outright blocking them — if that follower were to navigate directly to their page, it’d be clear that they had been blocked, […]
Gig and independent workers have different needs when it comes to financial products than salaried employees at a company. It’s a challenge that Tilak Joshi, founder of Lean, became acutely aware of during his tenure as head of Mint and years as a product exec at American Express and PayPal. While the U.S. has seen […]
Space can and should be about much more than giving the 1% another Instagrammable moment and increasing the wealth of the billionaires who provide the service.
