Making and keeping the web accessible is a full-time job, and like any other development role, accessibility tools need to evolve to keep up with the times. Evinced is a startup that promises both richer and faster checks of websites in production or in progress, and it just raised $17M to take its tools to […]
Services like video streaming, gaming, media-intensive advertising and marketing technology are putting more strain on bandwidth and backend latency than ever before due to the surge of online traffic in the last year. But for most organizations in today’s usage-based cloud world, that can represent a huge cost in compute power — or a major […]
Amazon has started making deliveries to customers in Los Angeles using electric vans designed and built by Rivian. The electric vans, which are part of Amazon’s 2040 climate pledge, won’t go into series production until the end of the year, according to an update Wednesday by the company. Amazon declined to reveal how many electric […]
Scratchpad is an early stage startup that wants to make it easier for sales people to get information into Salesforce by placing a notation layer on top of it. Today, it announced a $13 million Series A led by Craft Ventures with participation from Accel. The company has now raised a total of $16.6 million […]
Training AIs is essential to today’s tech sector, but handling the amount of data needed to do so is intrinsically dangerous. DARPA hopes to change that by tapping the encryption experts at Duality to create a hardware-accelerated method of using large quantities of data without decrypting it — a $14.5 million contract. Duality specializes in […]
Apple is facing calls to beef up enforcement against fake reviews and rating scams after a developer took to social media to shine a light on unfair practices he’s forced to compete with as a result of fraudulent activity on the App Store not being rooted out by the tech giant. Kosta Eleftheriou, one of […]
Consumer payments is by no means a solved problem (I’ll trigger one hundred blockchain people if I say otherwise), but it sure as heck a pretty improved one. Checkout is a breeze with modern tools ranging from Stripe and PayPal to Fast and Rapyd to Apple and Google Pay. If you happen to need financing, […]
Beam has raised a $9.5 million Series A round. The company is working on a new web browser that completely rethinks the way you start a web session and browse the web. The startup is founded by Dom Leca and Sébastien Métrot. Dom Leca previously worked on Sparrow, an email app with an opinionated design. […]
Events — when they haven’t been cancelled altogether in the last 12 months due to the global health pandemic — have gone virtual and online, and a wave of startups that are helping people create and participate in those experiences are seeing a surge of attention, and funding. In the latest development, New York video […]
TikTok this morning announced a new feature that aims to combat the spread of misinformation on its platform. In addition to removing videos that are identified to be spreading false information, as verified by fact checking partners, the company says it will now also flag videos where fact checks are inconclusive. These videos may also […]
If you’re at all interested in wine, chances are you’ve turned to Vivino at least a few times for recommendations. The app and the company behind it have been helping people enjoy better wine since 2010, and now the startup has raised $155 million with its Series D round – a sum over twice as […]
Grocery delivery startup Good Eggs is announcing that it has raised $100 million in new funding, and that it’s planning to launch in Southern California in either the summer or fall of this year. Parts of this story might sound familiar to readers familiar with Good Eggs — when the startup raised its most recent, […]
Finding, and retaining, frontline workers has likely never been as critical as it is in these pandemic days. Enter WorkStep, a four-year-old startup that was founded with the mission of helping large supply chain employers do just that. The fully distributed company announced this morning that it has closed on a $10.5 million Series A […]
India has issued a notice to Twitter, warning the American social firm to comply with New Delhi’s order to block accounts and content related to a protest by farmers and not “assume the role of a court and justify non-compliance.” Failure to comply with the order may prompt penal action against Twitter, the notice warns. […]
Embedded finance — the idea of offering financial products where customers are already congregating via white label solutions and APIs – isn’t an entirely new concept. In fact, in one form or another, such as point of sale credit, the concept has existed for years and long before Silicon Valley venture capital firm and media […]
Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, became profitable for the first time in the December quarter, the company announced in its earnings report. The firm’s cloud unit achieved positive adjusted EBITA (earnings before interest, taxes, and amortization) during the quarter, after being in business since 2009. The milestone is in […]
Eyelash extensions have taken off in recent years — particularly in Asia — but the audience is only so broad. Getting extensions — semi-permanent fibers that are attached to one’s natural eyelashes — can require hundreds of dollars and hours in the seat of a lash stylist. There’s always the risk, too, of irritation or […]
