Some people really need help with grammar. By the way, “a lot” is two words. “Your” and “you’re” are not the same thing. Grammarly has been quietly building a freemium grammar checker to help students, writers and people who want to make a good impression on social media or email. Now they’re raising $110 million from General… Read More
from TechCrunch
Pandora is taking a cash infusion to maintain “a strong balance sheet” as it struggles to shift from radio to the increasingly popular on-demand streaming model. Private equity firm KKR has agreed to buy $150 million in Series A preferred Pandora shares and be paid a 7.5 percent or 8 percent quarterly dividend; KKR’s Richard Sarnoff will take a board seat. Read More
from TechCrunch
Most venture capital funds that have 27 exits under their belt are not in stealth. In fact, most venture capital firms today don’t even know what 27 exits looks like. But Dell Ventures, in stealth until today, has been steadily investing at a rate of about $100 million per year. The group certainly knows what the market is willing to buy. It’s seen nearly 37 percent of… Read More
from TechCrunch
As music streaming continues to grow in ubiquity, a company that’s built a platform to collect royalties on music played across billions of streams is cashing in on the opportunity. Kobalt, the European startup that has built technology and a platform to collect music royalties by tracking when even a sample of a song is played across multiple platforms, has raised another $75… Read More
from TechCrunch
As open source database architecture continues to grow in popularity, one of the bigger developers in the area has picked up some funding in an attempt to better target the opportunity. MariaDB Corporation, the company that develops solutions and contributes to the open-source SQL fork managed by the MariaDB Foundation, today announced that it has raised €25 million ($27 million) from… Read More
from TechCrunch
Garena, one of Southeast Asia’s biggest tech startups, has picked up $550 million in new funding and changed its name. The Singapore-headquartered consumer Internet company told Bloomberg that it is now called Sea Ltd. to reflect is global expansion plans (and also because SEA is an acronym for Southeast Asia). Its new valuation was undisclosed. Read More
from TechCrunch
The year was off to a good start for technology acquisitions, according to data provided by PwC. There were 486 U.S. tech deals announced in the first quarter totaling $42.8 billion. In terms of both number of deals and value of deals, it was the best start of the year for U.S. tech M&A since 2014. There were 28% more deals than the same period last year, although the total was just 2%… Read More
from TechCrunch
Just six months into its life, Growlabs, a startup using machine intelligence to support outbound sales teams, has raised a $2.2 million seed round. Founded by Ben Raffi, the creator of ticketing app Universe, Growlabs helps businesses reduce their customer acquisition costs by enabling smalls sales teams to do more with less. From his past work with Universe, Raffi knows how difficult it… Read More
from TechCrunch
E-commerce fraud is a growing problem, but Signifyd thinks it has a solution to save businesses money. Their company is growing fast and has closed a $56 million Series C investment led by Bain Capital Ventures. Menlo Ventures also participated in the round. Signifyd counts big clients like Jet.com, Peet’s Coffee and Lacoste, where it uses its pattern recognition technology to warn… Read More
from TechCrunch
Some consolidation in the world of subject-specific search and social networks, as a legacy player from the world of white goods makes a play for a wider audience. The Whirlpool Corporation — the world’s largest home appliance maker, founded back in 1911 — has acquired Yummly, a visual and semantic recipe search engine and aggregator with 20 million users, which also let… Read More
from TechCrunch