There you have it. Steve Jobs’ will + Dow Jones + Apple Park = Google’s buying Apple. I think we finally have algorithmic transparency. This morning Dow Jones shot some fake news out over the wires announcing that Google was acquiring Apple for $9 billion. For a brief second, the news sent Apple’s stock up about $2 to $158 per share. To the benefit of everyone’s… Read More
from TechCrunch
In slightly bittersweet news, startup HandUp is selling itself to the Detroit-based South Oakland Shelter for an undisclosed amount. This isn’t your typical Silicon Valley exit where the founders and investors made a bunch of money. HandUp CEO Rose Broome described it to me as a “primary philanthropic acquisition.” But it’s still a solid outcome for a startup that… Read More
from TechCrunch
Carspring, the London and Berlin-based startup that makes it easy to buy a used car, has gone quiet, amid reports that its recent £5 million in Series B funding fell through. According to sources, Rocket Internet has pulled its investment in the company, which it co-founded with ex-McKinsey management consultants Peter Baumgart and Maximilian Vollenbroich. Read More
from TechCrunch
With a shortage of machine learning developers bearing down on the industry, startups and big tech companies alike are moving to democratize the tools necessary to commercialize artificial intelligence. The latest startup, Petuum, is announcing a $93 million Series B this morning from Softbank and Advantech Capital.
Founded last year by Dr. Eric Xing, a Carnegie Mellon machine learning… Read More
from TechCrunch
Airbnb finally got serious about the Chinese market this year, and now its chief rival in the country — Tujia — has tapped investors for $300 million more to sharpen its focus on global markets.
The new funding values Tujia at $1.5 billion, the startup confirmed. That’s a big jump on the $1 billion it commanded when it last raised in 2015, but the company is going to the… Read More
from TechCrunch
Vertex Ventures, one of the VC funds that is linked to Singapore sovereign fund Temasek, has closed its third investment fund for Southeast Asia and India with a total of $210 million for investment. Vertex Venture Holdings operates five funds across the world, which include vehicles focused on the U.S., Israel and healthcare. This is the third installment of its fund for India and Southeast… Read More
from TechCrunch
Verve, the U.K, startup formerly known as StreetTeam that offers a sales platform to enable brands to easily run advocacy programs, has picked up $18.5 million is Series B funding. The round is being led by publicly-listed VC Draper Esprit, with participation from previous investors Kindred, Frontline Ventures, and Backed. Read More
from TechCrunch
AMP — Google’s collaborative project to speed up the loading time for mobile web pages — is getting an interesting acceleration of its own today. Relay Media, a company founded by an ex-Googler that had developed technology to help covert web pages to the AMP format, has been acquired by Google. The company announced the news on its home page, to its customers (one of whom… Read More
from TechCrunch
Laundryheap is a London-headquartered laundry on-demand startup that has taken a different path to competitors such as Laundrapp and Rocket Internet’s Zipjet. Rather than raise VC funding, the company, which claims to already be break even and is operational in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Dublin and Dubai, has been entirely bootstrapped over the last three years. Read More
from TechCrunch
Cruise, the self-driving car startup GM acquired last year, has acquired a startup of its own – Strobe, a LiDAR sensor maker that reduces an entire LiDAR array down to just one chip, which Cruise says will be instrumental in helping it reduce the cost of LiDAR on a per vehicle basis by nearly 100 percent. The cost issue is a big one: LiDAR remains one of the single most expensive… Read More
from TechCrunch