Basis Set Ventures gets real to get to the heart of AI startups

 Lan Xuezhao has spent the last few months pulling together $136 million for her new machine intelligence-focused venture capital fund, Basis Set Ventures. I met Xuezhao for tea on a park bench in Potrero Hill earlier this week to chat about her strategy for the fund. Read More Post by startupsnows.blogspot.com

Egyptian technology startups stand on the shoulders of giants

 With technology and curious minds, several founders not only built great products and companies, they created the foundation for a strong and resilient technology sector that has been an economic driver and job creator in a country looking for stable footing. Read More Post by startupsnows.blogspot.com

Dharma wants to let anyone borrow a small amount of cryptocurrency

 dApps, or decentralized apps, are open-source applications built on top of a blockchain. But here’s the thing – users usually can’t interact with these dApps unless they have tokens issued by these projects. For example, both Augur, a decentralized prediction market and REXMLS, a free global listing network for real estate, require tokens to interact with. But if you… Read More Post by startupsnows.blogspot.com

Five years after its launch, website building platform Strikingly raises $6M Series A

 Half a decade after it was founded, website building platform Strikingly finally decided its time to raise a Series A. The Y Combinator alum announced that it closed a $6 million round from investors including CAS Holding, Infinity Venture Partners, Innovation Works, former Y Combinator partner Kevin Hale and TEEC. Strikingly also recently launched an app that lets users build and publish… Read More Post by startupsnows.blogspot.com

Disruptor Beam’s ‘Walking Dead: March to War’ puts you in the middle of a zombified Washington, D.C.

 Disruptor Beam has already created games based on Star Trek and Game of Thrones. Next up is The Walking Dead, with the launch of The Walking Dead: March to War. To create the game, which was first announced last year, the company partnered with Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman’s Skybound Entertainment. That means the game is technically an adaptation of the comics, but the… Read More Post by startupsnows.blogspot.com

Which is the best daily planner for busy entrepreneurs?

 Keeping on track is hard. Over the years I’ve tried a number of personal information managers – PIMs, for short – from the original Palm V to my current iPhone/iCal/Vyte/phone tag method of making sure I’m in the right place at the right time. It rarely works. Something is always dropping out. An appointment added a week ago disappears while old appointments reappear on… Read More Post by startupsnows.blogspot.com

Cowboy is a new e-bike startup from founders of Take Eat Easy

 De-cloaking today is a new startup from two of the founders of defunct food delivery company Take Eat Easy. Dubbed Cowboy, the company is building a new electronic bicycle that it claims will address issues that have historically stopped e-bikes from becoming a “fully fledged mobility solution”. Read More Post by startupsnows.blogspot.com

Podcast-focused media company HowStuffWorks spins out with $15M in new funding

 HowStuffWorks has changed owners more the once in the past few years. Discovery sold the company to Blucora in 2014, and Blucora, in turn, sold it to digital advertising company System1 last year. Now, however, the nearly 20-year-old digital media brand is spinning out as an independent company. It’s also announcing that it has raised $15 million in Series A funding led by The Raine… Read More Post by startupsnows.blogspot.com

Thirstie is powering on-demand delivery for Dom Perignon

 Booze delivery startup Thirstie is adding a new twist to its model — it’s working directly with alcohol brands, starting with Dom Perignon, to offer on-demand delivery. When we wrote about Thirstie back in 2015, the startup allowed consumers to buy alcohol from nearby stores that already made deliveries. Co-founder and CEO Devaraj Southworth said Thirstie will continue to offer… Read More Post by startupsnows.blogspot.com

Dropbox Paper gets document previews and some other small updates

 Dropbox continues to tune its products as it tries to tap a bigger audience within larger companies with some updates today to its collaboration tool Paper, including the ability to preview documents before loading them. As a blank slate, Paper is increasingly popular with designers you might talk to in Silicon Valley. It basically turns the process of designing and building a product spec into… Read More Post by startupsnows.blogspot.com

Ad-tech startup Adwerx raises $4.3M as it looks to expand beyond real estate

 Adwerx is a well-known advertising and re-targeting network for real estate agents (though if you’re not in that line of business, chances are you’ve never heard of it, of course). The Durham, NC-based company today announced that it has raised a $4.3 million funding round led by Grotech Ventures, with participation from Bull City Venture Partners and Alerion Ventures. Read More Post by startupsnows.blogspot.com

Expedia leads $26 million round in hospitality startup ALICE

 Before Uber poached Dara Khosrowshahi to serve as its CEO, he facilitated a $26 million series B round in hotel startup ALICE as CEO of Expedia. The idea with ALICE is to bring technology to the outdated hotel industry by offering up a system to run hotels on a single platform. This round brings ALICE’s total funding to $39 million and makes Expedia the startup’s majority… Read More Post by startupsnows.blogspot.com

Nuco’s Aion network provides a way to communicate between multiple blockchains

 As blockchains begin to gain in popularity, a need is developing to enable them to communicate with one another. That would require a networking infrastructure to facilitate that communication, and that’s precisely what Nuco, a Toronto-based startup is trying to do with the release of the Aion blockchain network today. Nuco CEO Matthew Spoke says that while each network is ultimately… Read More Post by startupsnows.blogspot.com

Domuso raises $3.1M to let you pay missed rent over time

 Domuso, a property management system and payment portal that lets tenants in sticky situations pay late rent over time, has raised $3.1M in funding. This brings the total amount raised for the startup, which was part of the Techcrunch Disrupt NY 2017 Battlefield competition, to $5.8M. The concept for Domuso is straightforward – there are certain life events that sometimes get in the way… Read More Post by startupsnows.blogspot.com

Homelike, a German startup that lets business travellers find an apartment, picks up €4M Series A

 One growing sector we can add to the travel accommodation list is long term stays for business travellers. Enter Cologne-based Homelike, founded in 2015 by Dustin Figge and Christoph Kasper. The German startup targets business travellers who need “long-stay” accommodation of a month or more and for which a hotel doesn’t really cut it. Read More Post by startupsnows.blogspot.com

Veo uses AI to let amateur soccer clubs video matches without the need for a camera operator

 Veo, a Copenhagen-based startup, wants to “democratise the recording of football”. By taking advantage of developments in AI and video camera technology, the company offers a solution for amateur soccer clubs that want to video and stream matches and training sessions without the need for a camera operator or vision mixer/editor. Read More Post by startupsnows.blogspot.com

AI startup Appier gets $33M Series C from investors including SoftBank Group, Line Corp and Naver

 Appier, a Taiwanese startup that helps companies harness artificial intelligence to make marketing decisions, announced today that it has raised a $33 million Series C round from an impressive roster of Asian investors. They are SoftBank Group Corp., Line Corp., Naver Corp., EDBI (the Singapore Economic Development Board’s corporate investment arm) and Hong Kong-based financial services… Read More Post by startupsnows.blogspot.com

Meet eight eight startups joining MetaProp NYC’s real estate accelerator

 For the third year, MetaProp NYC is bringing together a group of startups focused on real estate tech. This time, the companies are tackling issues like green buildings, apartment entry and parking. Most of them are based in New York, but some come from as far away as Singapore. “Our incoming accelerator cohort is indicative of the increasingly fast global growth and demand for… Read More Post by startupsnows.blogspot.com

Ryan Hoover’s $3M Angel Fund is going by the name Weekend Fund

 An SEC filing turned up this morning showing that Product Hunt’s Ryan Hoover is investing out of a $3 million AngelList Angel Fund going by the name Weekend Fund. We previously reported that Hoover was a deal lead through the Angel Funds product — but now we know the size and name of the vehicle. Today’s news, first reported by Axios, could indicate that Hoover is planning… Read More Post by startupsnows.blogspot.com

FitGenie is applying AI to automate nutrition planning

 It may well turn out, as technologists are already suspecting, that AI makes everything better. But plenty of startup founders are still in the experimental phase of figuring out whether — or maybe how much  — machine learning can improve an existing app category. Read More Post by startupsnows.blogspot.com

Tinder Gold, which lets you see who has liked you, launches today in U.S.

 As Rafiki once said, “It is time.” Tinder Gold, the dating app’s new premium subscription tier (which includes a feature that lets you see who’s already liked you without any swiping) is finally rolling out to the U.S. Tinder Gold and Likes You were originally tested in Argentina, Australia, Canada and Mexico at the end of June. Today, however, the the feature rolls out… Read More Post by startupsnows.blogspot.com

Cannabis website Herb raises $4.1M

 We get a lot of weed-related pitches at TechCrunch, but most of them don’t come with the pedigree of Herb‘s investors. Herb is announcing today that it has raised $4.1 million in seed funding led by Lerer Hippeau Ventures, with participation from Slow Ventures, Buddy Media co-founder Michael Lazerow, Shiva Rajarama, Liquid 2 Ventures (the firm led by football legend Joe… Read More Post by startupsnows.blogspot.com

Michael Jordan funds mercenary dev hub Gigster’s $20M enterprise pivot

 Gigster is shifting from letting anyone outsource full-stack app development to building next-gen tech projects for big companies. If an enterprise needs machine learning and vision, data visualization, blockchain, React or Swift work done and doesn’t want to hire full-time employees, Gigster assembles a squad of freelancers and guarantees the work at a fixed price. Read More Post by startupsnows.blogspot.com

BunkerEx is an online marketplace for shipping companies that need to buy fuel

 BunkerEx is a newly-funded startup out of London that is building an online marketplace to change the way shipping companies buy fuel, or ‘bunkers,’ to use the correct industry term. Read More Post by startupsnows.blogspot.com

Bunch wants to be ‘Google Analytics for company culture’

 Bunch, a newly-launched startup operating out of Berlin, is aiming to be something akin to a “Google Analytics for company culture”. It offers a SaaS to let companies and company teams quantify internal company culture, and then use this data as the basis to screen job candidates to help ensure that they will also be a good fit. Read More Post by startupsnows.blogspot.com