Adolescence is a turbulent period and its challenges are being exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Even in the best of times, teens dealing with personal and school problems might have trouble talking about them. New Zealand-based startup Komodo is a student well-being platform that wants to give students a place to communicate with staff, while […]
There has been significant hype around Latin America’s startup success. For good reason, too: Startups have raised $9.3 billion in just the first half of 2021, almost double the amount in all of 2020.
For more than a year now, Zoom has been on a mission to transform from an application into a platform. To that end it made three announcements last year: Zoom Apps development tools, the Zoom Apps marketplace and a $100 million development fund to invest in some of the more promising startups building tools on […]
Prive, a months-old, San Francisco-based startup founded by two former Uber product managers, just raised $1.7 million in pre-seed funding to create what it describes as a far more customizable e-commerce subscriptions platform for D2C brands. The round was co-led by Patrick Chung and Brandon Farwell at XFund and Ben Ling from Bling Capital, with […]
Alternative lending is any lending that occurs outside of a conventional financial institution. These lenders offer different types of loans such as lines of credit, microloans and equipment financing.
Popular instant messaging app Telegram has joined the elite club of apps that have been downloaded over 1 billion times globally, according to Sensor Tower. The Dubai-headquartered app, which was launched in late 2013, surpassed the milestone on Friday, the mobile insight firm told TechCrunch. As is the case with the app’s chief rival, WhatsApp, […]
Hair loss resulting from chemotherapy is one of the most recognizable side effects in all of medicine, and for many is an unwanted public announcement of their condition and treatment. Luminate Medical may have a solution in a medical wearable that prevents the chemical cocktail from tainting hair follicles, preventing the worst of the loss […]
TikTok parent company ByteDance seems to be looking to one-up Facebook anywhere it can. After taking over the mantle of most-downloaded social media app in the world with TikTok, ByteDance is coming for Facebook’s moonshot, buying up its own virtual reality headset maker called Pico. The deal first reported on by Bloomberg last week was […]
In a bid to expand its classical music offering, Apple today announced that it has acquired Primephonic. The Amsterdam-based service, which launched in 2014, will bring a laser focus on a music genre that’s been sorely lacking in Apple Music’s generalized approach to streaming. The service will effectively be discontinued as a standalone offering as […]
Instagram will begin prodding users to share their birthday with the service, if they haven’t already done so. The company today announced it will now start popping up a notification that asks you to add your birthday to “personalize your experience.” But the prompt can only be dismissed a handful of times before becoming a […]
Less than two weeks after its official launch, The Boring Company’s Loop system in Las Vegas had its first security breach. On June 21, the morning of the final day of the International Beauty Show, an “unauthorized vehicle” joined the system’s fleet of Tesla taxis underground, emails between the Loop’s operations manager and a Clark […]
One of the consequences of rising CO2 levels in our atmosphere is that levels also rise proportionately in the ocean, harming wildlife and changing ecosystems. Heimdal is a startup working to pull that CO2 back out at scale using renewable energy and producing carbon-negative industrial materials, including limestone for making concrete, in the process, and […]
Startup founders, take a minute to track Toast's revenue growth per category over time. Sometimes diversified offense is functional defense, it turns out.
The venture world is — quite literally — waking up to the potential of applying artificial intelligence to a wider variety of real-world, consumer-driven problems, and today comes the latest development on that front: Eight Sleep, which makes “smart” mattresses and mattress covers (for regular mattresses) that use machine learning and other artificial intelligence-based algorithms […]
Ryan Reynolds is America’s sweetheart, despite being both Canadian and somewhat irreverent. The actor, producer, screenwriter and entrepreneur has been nominated for a Golden Globe and Grammy for his work on the Deadpool franchise. But it wasn’t just his acting that made Deadpool a record-breaking, billion-dollar franchise. Reynolds is one of the world’s greatest when […]
A new startup called Clay, backed by $8 million in seed funding, has built a system designed to help you be more thoughtful with the people in your life, which operates somewhat like a personal CRM. With Clay, you build a collection of the people you meet by connecting your email and calendar with social […]
Who doesn’t want a vacation home? Right. That’s what I thought. Kocomo is a Mexico City-based startup that wants to help make that dream a reality. And it has just closed on $6 million equity and $50 million debt financing to advance on that goal. The company aims to allow for cross-border co-ownership of luxury […]
Ideanomics, a fintech and electric mobility firm based in New York, has added to its list of acquisitions: commercial electric vehicle manufacturer Via Motors (in an all-stock deal valued at $450 million). Ideanomics has been aggressively purchasing mobility businesses this year, as it seeks to build out vertically integrated offerings for fleet operators and transit […]
Petlove&Co, a São Paulo-based digital platform for products and services for the pet market, announced today that it has raised about $150 million (R$750 million) in a funding round led by Riverwood Capital. The round is nearly double that of what Petlove has raised in its history. The company started its life as PetSuperMarket when […]
