We’re seeing a gradual expansion of national regulations that require data from SaaS applications to be stored locally, in the country where it’s sourced and used. Today a startup that’s built a service around that need — specifically, data residency-as-a-service — is announcing some funding to continue building out its company amid strong demand. InCountry, […]
Amazon is leveraging its investment in live-streaming site Twitch to expand its Amazon Music service. The company announced this morning Twitch’s livestreams will now be available in the Amazon Music app on iOS and Android, with the goal of allowing fans and artists to connect amid a pandemic where in-person concerts have been cancelled. Since […]
Many companies have posted the occasional big quarter. These outsized periods may come when a business sells part of itself, or, through some arcane non-cash financial hijinks, it posts impressive numbers that appear prodigious when compared to their regular operating results. (Like when Uber recorded huge profits in its March 31, 2018 quarter.) The Exchange […]
Gong announced a $200 million Series D investment just last month, and loaded with fresh cash, the company wasted no time taking advantage. Today, it announced it was buying early stage Isreali sales technology startup Vayo. The companies did not share terms of the deal, but Gong CEO Amit Bendov said the deal closed a […]
Bambuser is a name that you may not have heard in a while, but the Stockholm-headquartered company is announcing today that it’s raised $45 million in new funding this year, with $34.5 million of that amount raised during the pandemic. Bambuser’s history goes back more than a decade (the first TechCrunch coverage appeared in 2008). […]
PicnicHealth, the startup that’s looking to give patients a way to manage their care in one place and pharmaceutical companies access to patient records for real world data, has just raised $25 million in financing to grow its business. Founded in 2016 by a former international development worker and Crohn’s Disease patient, Noga Leviner, PicnicHealth’s […]
Hazel Health was founded five years ago to provide telemedicine services to children in public schools. Launched by a former Apple software engineer and serial entrepreneur, Nick Woods, and named after one of Woods’ children, Hazel Health has grown to work with school districts responsible for 1.5 million children, and has raised $33.5 million to […]
Oliver Zahn began his professional career studying the stars. The founder of Climax Foods, a startup that’s using data science to replace animal proteins with plant-based substitutes, spent years at the University of California at Berkeley with his eyes fixed firmly toward the heavens before taking up with Pat Brown and Impossible Foods as the […]
A new Los Angeles startup is betting that enough consumers are interested in paying between $69 and $149 per year to receive lessons in life and sports from celebrity athletes like Maria Sharapova and Shaun White to make a billion-dollar business. That’s the gamble that Maveron, Global Founders Capital, and 8VC are taking on The Skills, […]
The COVID-19 pandemic has proven a significant catalyst for robotics investments, as companies look to invest in automation. Utah-based Sarcos Robotics bucks the trend a bit, however, as the purveyor of a technology designed to augment an existing human workforce, rather than replacing a significant chunk through automation. Today the robotic exoskeleton creator announced a […]
VoIP provider Dialpad, the company behind the popular video conferencing service UberConference, today announced that it has acquired Highfive, a well-funded video conferencing startup that focuses on providing businesses with conference room solutions. The two companies did not disclose the purchase price, but Highfive raised $77.4 million from the likes of Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen […]
Facebook has offered a little detail on extra steps it’s taking to improve its ability to detect and remove hate speech and election disinformation ahead of Myanmar’s election. A general election is scheduled to take place in the country on November 8, 2020. The announcement comes close to two years after the company admitted a […]
Edtech just keeps on booming. Today, Owl Ventures, a San Francisco-based education technology fund whose portfolio includes Byju’s, Labster, Masterclass and Quizlet, announced that it has closed a pair of investment vehicles totaling $585 million. Owl Ventures IV is a $415 million investment vehicle which will be used to invest in edtech startups Series A […]
Four years after the Great Recession, France’s newly elected socialist president François Hollande raised taxes and increased regulations on founder-led startups. The subsequent flight of entrepreneurs to places like London and Silicon Valley portrayed France as a tough place to launch a company. By 2016, France’s national statistics bureau estimated that about three million native-born […]
Salesforce has been adding artificial intelligence to all parts of its platform for several years now. It calls the underlying artificial intelligence layer on the Salesforce platform Einstein. Today the company announced some enhancements to its field service offering that take advantage of this capability. Eric Jacobson, VP of product management at Salesforce says that […]
Seedrs — the UK’s first full-function private equity secondary market to launch back in 2017 — is launching its secondary market offering to all private businesses. The idea is that this will allow founders, employees and early investors to realize secondary liquidity without having to wait for an IPO or exit event. Seedrs has offered […]
Data protection and data privacy have gone from niche concerns to mainstream issues in the last several years, thanks to new regulations and a cascade of costly breaches that have laid bare the problems that arise when information and data security are treated haphazardly. Yet that swing has also thrown up a whole series of […]
Adtech giant and self-styled ‘free speech champion’, Facebook, has threatened to pull the plug on the public sharing of news content on Facebook and Instagram in Australia. The aggressive threat is Facebook’s attempt to lobby against a government plan that will require it and Google to share revenue with regional news media to recompense publishers […]
Cosmose tracks foot traffic in brick-and-mortar stores to help predict customer behavior, providing data that is increasingly important as companies try to weather COVID-19’s economic impact. Today the startup announced it has raised a $15 million Series A. The round was by Tiga Investments, with participation from returning investors OTB Ventures and TDJ Pitango, who […]
Javed, a middle-aged man, worked as a driver before losing that job earlier this year as coronavirus spread across India, prompting New Delhi to enforce a nationwide lockdown and temporarily curb several business activities. There are millions of people like Javed in India today who have lost their livelihood in recent months. They are low-skilled […]
