Three members of the senior investing team at Genesis Partners, a major Israeli venture firm, are stepping out with a new, early-stage fund of their own called F2 Capital. For the unfamiliar, Genesis Partners’ portfolio companies have been acquired by the likes of Apple, IBM, Microsoft and Sapiens over the past decade, and have gone public on the Nasdaq exchange in the U.S. as well.… Read More
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This afternoon, Norwest Venture Partners announced that it led a massive $210 million Series D investment round in OpenDoor. The startup is looking to expand the usage of its marketplace platform for buying and selling real estate to 10 cities with the new capital. OpenDoor is unique in that it owns its own inventory of homes. While the predictive analytics the company employs to project… Read More
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Game tech startup Skillz today launched a service that allows brands to easily sponsor and host mobile e-sports tournaments for any game titles that they like, as long as they are already part of the Skillz platform. As we’ve previously reported, Skillz enables developers to turn mobile games into tournament-playable titles, without writing a ton of new code. Its technology operates as… Read More
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Online anonymity can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can give people a voice when they’d otherwise be afraid to speak up – whether that’s because of fear of government surveillance, discussing a topic that’s known to provoke cyberbullying, or because the topic itself is sensitive – like a personal confession or health issue. But anonymity also… Read More
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Big tech companies have been creating accelerators left and right to evangelize their brands and get developers engaged with APIs and other open source efforts. Today, Amazon joined the crowd by announcing a new program for startups developing conversational AI. This is Amazon’s first foray into the world of accelerator programs, though its $100 million Alexa Fund has already invested… Read More
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Reddit will start issuing warnings, timeouts, and permanent bans to its most abusive trolls, but will also limit the content manipulation capabilities of its own CEO after he apologized today for ethical violations that shook the trust of the online community. Last week, Reddit CEO Stuff Huffman, who goes by the handle Spez, secretly edited users’ comments in the pro-Trump subreddit… Read More
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Rick Schwartz has produced some great, successful movies, includingThe Departed, Black Swan and Gangs of New York. But with Jerrick Media Holdings (founded with former Wall Street executive Jeremy Frommer), he’s shifting his focus to the online world. Schwartz explained the move by saying he’d “noticed that it was harder and harder to get people to go into theaters… Read More
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The White House announced today new and expanded plans to improve diversity and inclusion within the startup economy, focused on higher education, investment and entrepreneurship. The diversity commitments made by schools, venture capital firms and tech companies represent a passing of the torch from the Obama administration to the private sector, which has been asked to take on the challenge… Read More
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Instead of killing time on your phone playing games or browsing Facebook, the recently launched application Hardbound aims to help you fill your spare minutes by learning something new instead. The months-old app introduces its own visual and interactive format for mobile storytelling, allowing you to tap through interesting mini-stories covering science, history, technology, business and… Read More
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Email apps are a dime a dozen. There are the regular emails apps that come with our phones, there’s Gmail and Spark and there’s 50 others that all offer just about the same thing. Zero is trying something different. Think of Zero as an AI-enabled email system. It reads your messages as they come in and allows you to do all the regular stuff – move emails into trash, snooze… Read More
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TraceLink, the SaaS platform for tracking and tracing pharmaceuticals, has today announced the close of a $51.5 million Series C financing led by Goldman Sachs Growth Equity. Existing investors, such as FirstMark Capital, Volition Capital, and F-Prime Capital, also participated in the round. As part of the deal, Goldman’s Jason Kreuziger is joining TraceLink’s board of… Read More
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Dubsmash, the lip-syncing video app from Berlin that became a surprise social hit last year, has raised Series B funding. According to multiple sources — and now confirmed by the company — Sunstone Capital has led a €9 million (~$9.6m) round with participation from Index Ventures, Balderton Capital, Eniac Venture, and Lowercase Capital. Read More
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Civis Analytics, a company founded by the chief analytics officer of Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, has raised $22 million in Series A funding. Founder and CEO Dan Wagner told me that after the election, he discovered that many organizations — whether they were in politics, government or business — were dealing with problems similar to the ones he faced during… Read More
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Style transfer startup Prisma added support to its iOS app for livestreaming its art filter effects in real-time via Facebook Live earlier this month — but almost immediately the startup’s access to the Live API was cut off by the social media platform giant. Read More
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Knotch promises marketers a better way to collect user feedback about the effectiveness of their sponsored content. Now it’s announcing that it has received a design patent for its approach. Basically, when a sponsored article uses Knotch, a survey question pops up at the end, which is supposed to help advertisers assess your state of mind after reading the article. The big difference… Read More
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One of the challenges of Internet of Things is the poor availability and high price of mobile data. Twilio announced it was going to have a stab at changing that earlier this year. Today Soracom showed off its solutions to ease the pain of IoT adaptation across the industry. The company’s slightly byzantine pricing plans are optimized for a number of low-bandwidth, high uptime applications. Read More
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In Ernestine Fu’s future, you shouldn’t have to wait more than a few seconds to launch a game or an app to connect with a friend. In fact, a few seconds might even be too long. That’s what prompted the birth of Blackstorm, a development platform that has the tools to build high-fidelity applications — the same you might get from an app in the App Store — in HTML5… Read More
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Mental health is one of the buzzwords of the moment, especially now Royalty like Prince William and Duchess Katherine have been championing it, along with Kid Cudi, Cara Delevingne and others saying that they would be open to sending their children to counselling. One in five people have suffered from depression, one in two will suffer of some other mental disturbance in their lifetimes. If… Read More
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A new venture fund called Starburst Ventures has raised a $200 million debut fund to invest in early stage aerospace startups over the next three years. The fund is an extension of the Starburst Accelerator, which was founded in 2012 to help aviation and aerospace tech startups raise seed funding, and score their first big deal with a corporate customer, typically representing $1 million or… Read More
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Mojiworks, new startup from the founders of Wonderland, the UK gaming startup acqui-hired by Zynga back in 2011, is on a mission to turn Apple’s iMessage into a social gaming platform. Read More
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Say you’re an app developer and you need to give your app users a way of uploading, storing and playing back video. Instead of having to build your own video content management system or licensing one of the existing ones, Synq offers developers a third option. The company is launching its “cloud video API for Developers,” service today, aiming to be a full video… Read More
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Make way for another startup that wants to shake up the world of music and audio technology. Devialet, the French developer of high-end speakers and the IP behind the sound systems that make them go boom, has raised €100 million ($106 million). This is a strategic growth round that is bringing in a number of high-profile new investors — and with them, a lot more audio… Read More
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If there was a product that could make you dig out your dust-collecting GoPro from the “misc” drawer and turn it into a 3D-filming camera, would you buy it? Of course you would; 737 people said “yes, please” in the Vitrima Indiegogo campaign, backing it to breathe some life into their GoPros. Shipping today, the product is available to order for $145 from the… Read More
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The Yeehaw is a 3D printer aimed at the kids market. The company’s Indiegogo campaign carries a $249 early-bird price tag and promises to ship the first 50 units in time for Christmas. There were a few things about the company’s campaign that gave me pause. The device was designed with safety in mind, with sensors shutting off the printer in case some little fingers get a little… Read More
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The original Facetune app made it easy and fast to make your selfies look next-level awesome. Lightricks just released a fully revamped version 2 of Facetune, complete with automatic 3D meshing built in, which makes it possible to have another level of editing prowess at your fingertips. Read More
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