Amazon reported its second-quarter earnings today, and it was a bit of a whiff — and a bummer for Jeff Bezos, who is now no longer the Solar System’s richest human and has been relegated to the unfortunate position of second-richest human. The company’s earnings came in lighter than Wall Street expected. But Amazon’s cloud server farms, AWS, once again appear to be… Read More
from TechCrunch
London-based Callsign has closed a $35 million Series A, led by Accel and early stage investor PTB Ventures, for an authentication platform which uses deep learning technology to power adaptive access control for enterprises — saying it can verify a person is who they say they are just from a swipe on a touchscreen. Read More
from TechCrunch
The long running saga over the future of Indian e-commerce firm Snapdeal may be close to a conclusion at last. The company has been repeatedly link with an acquisition by rival Flipkart, and now a deal worth a touch under $1 billion has been agreed to in principle. That’s according to a report from Reuters which claims the Snapdeal board has signed off on a takeover from Flipkart that… Read More
from TechCrunch
Brolly, a U.K. ‘insurtech’ startup that offers an app to help you manage and purchase various insurance products, has raised £1 million in seed funding. Valar Ventures, the U.S.-based venture fund backed by Peter Thiel, led the round, with Pi Labs co-leading. Entrepreneur First (EF) also participated via the company builder’s £40 million “Next Stage Fund”. Read More
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WeWork is making a big move to win the co-working market in China after it announced the creation of a standalone WeWork China business, backed by $500 million from existing backers SoftBank and Hony Capital. It isn’t clear whether this fresh influx of capital is tied to a recent $760 million financing round that closed earlier this month, at a reported valuation of $20 billion.… Read More
from TechCrunch
Enterprise messaging service Slack is raising a $250 million round at a $5 billion valuation, TechCrunch has confirmed. We’re hearing that SoftBank, Accel Partners and other existing investors participated.
The $250 million financing amount was reported by Bloomberg. Axios first had the names of the lead investors. Recode originally reported on a $500 million round last month, but… Read More
from TechCrunch
When SoftBank announced the first close of its $93 billion Vision Fund back in May, it was hard to understand how the company would even manage to deploy so much capital in an already saturated ecosystem. For starters, it seemed like a good idea to keep a running list of all Vision Fund investments for reference. We will update this list on a regular basis. Read More
from TechCrunch
The IPO market isn’t looking much more vibrant than last year, underscores a new survey. That could be discouraging for those who hoped a blah year would lead to a booming one. In fact, unless the fall is an especially active time for IPOs — and it might be — 2017 may well serve as one of the less memorable years in recent history. Read More
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With its Stripe Connect product, Stripe wants to make it easier on-demand and marketplace businesses to not only process payments from their customers, but also make payments to contractors and vendors. In an effort to bolster the tax reporting tools available to them, the company has acquired long-term partner Payable. Read More
from TechCrunch
It’s hard raising money as a consumer packaged goods (CPG) company, but one startup wants to make it easier. CircleUp, which already helps consumer brands raise millions in equity financing, is now going to issue loans to help smaller CPG companies raise working capital and avoid cash crunches. Read More
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