At TC Sessions: Justice on March 3, we’re going to dive head-first into data discrimination, algorithmic bias and how to ensure a more just future, as technology companies rely more on automated processes to make decisions. Algorithms are sets of rules that computers follow in order to solve problems and make decisions about a particular […]
Stilt, a provider of financial services for immigrants in the United States, announced today it has raised a $100 million warehouse facility from Silicon Valley Bank for lending to its customers. This brings Stilt’s total debt facilities so far to $225 million, and will enable it to reach more than $350 million in annualized loan […]
Last year, we hit you with 44(!) episodes of Extra Crunch Live, a series that gives startups and founders direct insights from the experts who know best. We’re making Extra Crunch Live even better in 2021: we’ll take a look at funding deals through the eyes of the founders and investors who made them happen, […]
Charlie, a personal finance app that began as a chatbot, is relaunching today with a revamped experience focused on the larger goal of helping everyday Americans get out of debt. To do so, Charlie presents users with a full picture of their current debt and how long it will take them to pay it off. […]
Finesse, a startup promising to take the guesswork and waste out of fashion, is announcing that it has raised $4.5 million in seed and pre-seed funding. Founder and CEO Ramin Ahmari said the tremendous waste in the fashion industry has become a badly kept secret, with Burberry recently facing a backlash over its practice of […]
The top-line feature for Ring’s latest is no doubt its price. No way around that. At $60, it’s $40 cheaper than the standard Video Doorbell – and prices from there go up significantly, with the “Elite” running $350. Perhaps the company is feeling some pressure from the race the bottom for smart home hardware pricing. […]
Pinecone, a new startup from the folks who helped launch Amazon SageMaker, has built a vector database that generates data in a specialized format to help build machine learning applications faster, something that was previously only accessible to the largest organizations. Today the company came out of stealth with a new product and announced a […]
SAP today announced a new offering it calls ‘RISE with SAP,’ a solution that is meant to help the company’s customers go through their respective digital transformations and become what SAP calls ‘intelligent enterprises.’ RISE is a subscription service that combines a set of services and product offerings. SAP’s head of product success Sven Denecken […]
Gamestop shares are set to rally 70% this morning when trading starts, and AMC shares opened up 300%, extending a run that has perplexed market observers, irked hedge funds, and generally made crypto’s recent gains appear soft and weak. Being a retail trader is mostly being a sucker, hoping to best the markets while lacking […]
After acquiring Optimizely last fall, content management company Episerver is adopting the Optimizely name for the entire organization. CEO Alex Atzberger told me that the company will be rolling out new branding in the next coming months, as well as renaming its entire product suite to reflect the Optimizely brand. “We believe it’s no longer […]
Days after the billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya announced his involvement in the $1.3 billion acquisition of the solar and home improvement lending business Sunlight Financial, a collection of investors announced a nearly $1 billion cash infusion into Loanpal, another renewable energy and home improvement lender. The $800 million commitment to Loanpal arrives alongside a flurry […]
Lynk, a “knowledge-as-a-service” platform that connects clients with over 840,000 experts in a wide range of fields, announced today it has raised $24 million led by Brewer Lane Ventures and MassMutual Ventures, with participation from Alibaba Entrepreneurs Fund. The company uses machine learning algorithms to match users, who include investment firms, Fortune 100 companies and […]
Literati has raised a $40 million Series B to pursue an unusual startup opportunity — namely, book clubs. Founder and CEO Jessica Ewing (a former product manager at Google) explained that the Austin-based company started out with book clubs for kids, before launching its Luminary brand for adult book clubs last year. And the Luminary […]
LottieFiles, a platform for JSON-based Lottie animations, has raised a Series A of $9 million. The round was led by M12, Microsoft’s venture capital arm, with participation from returning investor 500 Startups. Based in San Francisco and Kuala Lumpur, LottieFiles was founded in 2018. The platform includes Lottie creation, editing and testing tools, and a […]
A year ago, Starship Technologies had a couple hundred autonomous bots delivering burritos and pizzas to students on college campuses and residents in a few neighborhoods. The company — with $17 million of new capital in its coffers — has expanded its fleet five-fold since COVID-19 swept through the European and North American markets that […]
Classiq, a Tel Aviv-based startup that aims to make it easier for computer scientists and developers to create quantum algorithms and applications, today announced that it has raised a $10.5 million Series A round led by Team8 Capital and Wing Capital. Entrée Capital, crowdfunding platform OurCrowd and Sumitomo Corporation (through IN Venture) also participated in […]
The pandemic has spelled economic setbacks for many people and industries, but the capital swirling about the technology world continues to roar along. In the latest development, TCV — the storied venture capital firm behind the likes of Airbnb, Spotify, Peloton and Facebook — has closed a record $4 billion for its latest fund. This […]
It’s not every day you see a Latin American startup funded by a U.S. venture capital firm based in the midwest. Playvox, a Colombian startup that wants to bring a positive twist to customer service monitoring announced a $25 million investment from Five Elms Capital, a Kansas City, MO VC firm. It has now raised […]
Datastax, the company best known for commercializing the open-source Apache Cassandra database, is moving beyond databases. As the company announced today, it has acquired Kesque, a cloud messaging service. The Kesque team built its service on top of the Apache Pulsar messaging and streaming project. Datastax has now taken that team’s knowledge in this area […]
