Lee Li Contributor Lee Li is a project manager and B2B copywriter with a decade of experience in the Chinese fintech startup space as a PM for TaoBao, MeitTuan and DouYin (now TikTok). Investment in fintech is surging back following a brief but notable drop during the COVID pandemic. As a result, countries worldwide are
Month: November 2021
Startups are often questions: What if we did things in a new way, instead of the way we have been? Massive is a good example of the genre: What if users could pay for apps or services not with money or attention, but with their spare compute power? The general concept of distributed compute power
Jack Dorsey was Twitter’s first CEO — and also its fourth. He led the platform from its launch in 2006 until he passed the torch to co-founder Ev Williams two years later. In 2015, Dorsey returned to the role after Dick Costolo’s stint, even though he was simultaneously serving as CEO of fintech platform Square.
Longer-term energy storage is a drag, and a lot of battery tech has been focusing on “how quickly can we charge these batteries so I can drive my EV for another couple of hundred miles.” That’s a fundamentally different problem than trying to capture the power of the sun for 12 hours, before releasing the
At AWS’s re:Invent conference this morning, the company announced AWS IoT TwinMaker, a new service that makes it easy to create and use digital twins of real-world systems. For context, digital twins are virtual representations of things like buildings, factories, production lines and equipment that are regularly updated with real-world data to mimic the behavior
Google today announced the winners of its “Best of 2021” app awards, which highlight both the company’s and users’ picks for the best apps and games from the past year. This year, Google is expanding its awards lineup to include apps and games on tablets, Wear OS and Google TV, it says. Its U.S. winners
Sapphire Ventures will inject $2 billion of newly raised capital into growth-stage enterprise companies from two new funds, Sapphire Ventures Fund VI and Sapphire Ventures Opportunity Fund III. The new funding represents the venture capital firm’s largest raise to date, Nino Marakovic, CEO of Sapphire, told TechCrunch, giving it more than $8.8 billion in assets
Fundbox, a company that offers loans to small businesses, announced today it has raised $100 million in a Series D round at a valuation of $1.1 billion. Or more simply, the company aims to solve SMBs’ working capital needs through its credit and payments offerings. It is particularly focused on B2B-focused small businesses. “We use
In a significant push against big tech’s ability to maintain market dominance through sheer buying power, the UK’s competition watchdog has ordered Facebook (now Meta) to reverse its acquisition of animated GIF platform, Giphy — confirming the Financial Times‘ earlier reporting. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said its phase 2 investigation cemented earlier competition
Abacum, a SaaS maker geared toward upgrading mid-sized companies’ financial planning and analysis tools, has fast-followed the $7 million seed it raised earlier this year (April) with a $25M Series A round. The latest funding brings its total raised to date to $32M. The Series A is led by European VC Atomico, with participation from
Companies today want to avoid the lock-in they faced in the past with a single vendor. As a result, they are hedging their bets with a multi-cloud strategy, but this creates a new problem around finding a single tool for managing it all. That’s where Upbound comes in with its open source Crossplane multi-cloud management tool.
YallaMarket, a Dubai-based quick-commerce startup, is planning to expand within the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E), and to enter Saudi Arabia and Qatar next year, to tap the appetite for speedy and convenient grocery shopping. The startup, which was formally launched last month, is expanding in the U.A.E cities of Abu Dhabi and Dubai by setting
Meet Upway, a French startup that is building a marketplace for second-hand electric bikes. The startup just raised a $5.7 million (€5 million) seed round from Sequoia Capital and Global Founders Capital. If you’re familiar with the world of online marketplaces for cars, Upway will sound familiar to you as well. The company buys electric
GajiGesa’s earned wage access feature user flow GajiGesa, a fintech company focused on services for Indonesian workers, announced today that it has raised $6.6 million USD in pre-Series A funding. The round was led by MassMutual Ventures, with participation from January Capital, European earned wage access company Wagestream (EWA is GajiGesa’s flagship feature), Bunda Group,
When Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey announced today his plans to step down as CEO, he didn’t go quietly. “There’s a lot of talk about the importance of a company being ‘founder-led,’” he wrote. “Ultimately I believe that’s severely limiting and a single point of failure. I’ve worked hard to ensure this company can break away
The fleet management industry needs to be able to predict when a truck or a van is about to break down. Not only does this prevent millions in lost revenues, it also has huge implications for supply chains. ‘Predictive maintenance’ is one of those spaces in which you will find several incumbent companies, such as
Amazon CloudWatch was introduced way back in 2009 to help AWS customers view data about their cloud usage and spending. Today at the dawn of AWS re:Invent, the company’s cloud customer conference taking place in Las Vegas this week, the cloud division announced a couple of enhancements to the product. Amazon has been building on
Well, so much for a relaxed post-holiday week on Monday. News broke this morning that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is stepping down from the company entirely. The company’s CTO, Parag Agrawal, will be taking over at the helm. Saleforce exec Bret Taylor will take over as board chairman. So, Amanda and Natasha and Alex jumped
Yassir, an Algerian startup that provides on-demand services such as ride-hailing and last-mile delivery, has raised a $30 million Series A round. The investment came from a long list of VCs and angel investors. VCs include WndrCo, DN Capital, Kismet Capital, Spike Ventures, Quiet Capital, Endeavor Catalyst, FJ Labs, VentureSouq, Nellore Capital and Moving Capital.
Being in control of customer data is one of the ways retailers, like Amazon, Spotify and Netflix, are able to tap into consumer behavior and create customized experiences whenever a user logs in. Those are some of the reasons Amazon, in particular, is poised to grab 50% of the U.S. e-commerce market this year, and
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen will go before Congress again this week, this time offering her unique perspective on the company’s moderation and policy failures as they relate to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the key legal shield that protects online platforms from liability for the user-created content they host. The House Energy and
Controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI is facing a potential fine in the UK. It has also been handed a provisional notice to stop further processing of UK citizens’ data and to delete any data it already holds as a result of what the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) described as “alleged serious breaches” of national
Kerry Cunningham Contributor Currently senior principal at 6sense, Kerry Cunningham is a thought leader in B2B marketing and is a former SiriusDecisions and Forrester analyst. A few years back, my former colleagues and I at SiriusDecisions introduced what we called the Intent Data Framework (IDF). About a year ago, we updated the model to include
A number of startups are experimenting with what a better social app could look like. For a startup called Alms, the answer is a social network that focuses on users’ well-being through participation in creator-led challenges in areas like personal growth, sustainability, and others with positive impacts. Instead of driving the collection “likes,” as on
QR code ordering at restaurants has been around for years, but the pandemic increased its adoption as social distancing and hygiene measures went into place. Mr Yum, a Melbourne-based mobile ordering and payments platform that was founded in 2018, announced today it has raised a $65 million USD Series A round, led by Tiger Global.
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. With a holiday-impacted week behind us, we hope that you are ready for the next few weeks of busy news. Because starting in the back-half of December, the world is going to slow
CNBC reported this morning that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is expected to step down from his role at the social media company. Dorsey is the CEO of both Twitter and Square, a financial company that serves both consumer and corporate customers with payment, cash management and transference services. Twitter’s stock rose on the news that
Thought Machine, a 2014 (Xoogler) founded startup that sells cloud-based b2b banking services, has closed a $200 million Series C round and announced that it’s achieved unicorn status (aka, passing a $1BN valuation). The new funding follows an $83M Series B round last year — when it described its market cap as “increasing healthily”. The
Amanda Keton Contributor Christian Humborg Contributor As COVID-19 spread rapidly across the world in 2020, people everywhere were hungry for reliable information. A global network of volunteers rose to the challenge, consolidating information from scientists, journalists and medical professionals, and making it accessible for everyday people. Two of them live almost 3,200 kilometers away from
It was only in June that Motorway – a U.K. platform on which professional car dealers can bid in an auction for privately owned cars for sale – raised $67.7 million in a Series B round. It’s now raised a $190m Series C funding round led by Index Ventures and ICONIQ Growth, a leading Silicon
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