Chinese electric vehicle startup Nio has secured a $1 billion investment from several state-owned companies in Hefei in return for agreeing to establish headquarters in the city’s economic development hotspot and giving up a stake in one of its business units. The injection of capital comes from several investors, including Hefei City Construction and Investment […]
Spotify’s podcast business is booming despite — or perhaps, because of — the COVID-19 pandemic. The company says it has now grown its podcast catalog to more than a million shows, up from the 700,000-plus podcasts it was reporting just this March. Podcaster listeners are also “more engaged overall” and “listen to more music,” the […]
Machine learning has quickly gone from niche field to crucial component of innumerable software stacks, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. The tools needed to create and manage it are enterprise-grade and often enterprise-only — but Determined AI aims to make them more accessible than ever by open-sourcing its entire AI infrastructure product. The company […]
If we want to learn how to build in times of crises, it’s worth looking at the innovators and entrepreneurs that tackled such complex problems before us.
Atlassian is about as ubiquitous to software engineers as Google is to the rest of us. The Sydney-based company, which launched in 2002, develops tools and services for enterprise collaboration and marched efficiently to a public offering in 2015. So it goes without saying that we’re thrilled to have Atlassian co-founder and co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes […]
23andMe. MongoDB. Eventbrite. Evernote. Bird. Square . Tumblr. Unity. YouTube. Xoom. Roelof Botha has had a seat on each of these companies’ boards, but his list of investments is much, much longer. The Sequoia partner, leading the firm’s US business, is legendary in Silicon Valley and the broader tech world, and we’re very excited that […]
Continuing our week’s coverage of new venture funds, this morning let’s dig into Kickstart’s latest capital pool. Kickstart Seed Fund, based in Utah’s Salt Lake City, has raised a $110 million Fund V it announced this morning, its largest to date. The firm’s rise to investing prominence has largely coincided with Utah’s own emergence as a […]
A number of UK computer security and privacy experts have signed an open letter raising transparency and mission creep concerns about the national approach to develop a coronavirus contacts tracing app. The letter, signed by 177 academics, follows a similar letter earlier this month signed by around 300 academics from across the world, who urged […]
As coronavirus-hit financial markets continue to flip-flop in the wake of bad news followed by pockets of hope, a startup that aims to introduce ordinary consumers to investing has raised a big round of funding. New York-based Stash, which provides a mobile-first route to managing money through investment — as well as retirement, custodial and […]
Twitter has said that tweets posted early Tuesday morning by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk that irresponsibly call for restrictions put in place to defend against the spread of COVID-19 don’t violate its guidelines around inaccurate or disputed information about the coronavirus that could cause harm. Musk tweeted a series of things on Tuesday, […]
The coronavirus pandemic, however, is having an outsized impact on Latin America’s startup activity compared to other regions, judging by Q1 2020 activity numbers.
You know that old saying, “You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone?” Sometimes, that’s quite literally true. Take Shoelace, a social app introduced by Google’s Area 120 incubator last summer. There are a number of reasons you likely haven’t heard of the thing. For starters, it was considered an “early experiment” by Google. […]
The coronavirus pandemic has sent record numbers of new users to video chat apps. Now, video messaging app Marco Polo aims to capitalize on the increases it’s also seeing to launch its new subscription business, Marco Polo Plus. The service delivers a handful of new features — including support for HD video, voice-only messaging options, […]
Zoom is an enterprise software company built to help employees meet virtually, it was never intended to be the social platform that guided a disconnected world through a lockdown. On the back of a big quarantine usage bump, Squad, a social screen-sharing mobile app popular with teen girls, is looking to eat away at Zoom’s […]
Puppet, the Portland-based infrastructure automation company, today announced that it has named former Cloud Foundry Foundation executive director Abby Kearns as its new CTO. Current Puppet CTO Deepak Giridharagopal will remain in his role and focus on R&D and leading new projects, while Kearns will focus on expanding the company’s product portfolio and communicating with […]
Despite the implications of its name, edtech platform Niche took nearly a decade-and-a-half to find its place within the world of the college search process. The company started as College Prowler, selling informational books, which looked like a hybrid between CliffsNotes and a Zagat guide, about colleges. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies and […]
Tax policy is surely a complex beast, and depending on your political leanings, you probably have some strong feelings about how it should be implemented. Salesforce AI researchers are trying to build a model to bring artificial intelligence to bear on what will undoubtedly always be a highly political process. Richard Socher, who heads up […]
NASA is going to test a new solar sail system to determine if it’s a viable alternative to propellant-based thrusters for maneuvering small satellites, and potentially for low-cost transportation of spacecraft set on deep-space missions. The agency has selected Illinois-based NanoAvionics to provide the spacecraft that will be used to test the solar sail system, […]
Mojo Vision’s technology still felt early-stage when we met with them back at CES. But the demos we did see were enough to convince us that there really could be something to the California startup’s smart contact lens technology. Clearly we weren’t alone in that. The company just announced that it has raised more than […]
