It’s official…Amazon says its purchase of Whole Foods will close on Monday. According to the release, “the two companies will together pursue the vision of making Whole Foods Market’s high-quality, natural and organic food affordable for everyone. As a down payment on that vision, Whole Foods Market will offer lower prices starting Monday on a selection of… Read More
from TechCrunch
Descartes Labs is announcing a $30 million Series B this morning in a large round led by March Capital. This comes just three months after one of Descartes’ largest competitors, Orbital Insight, closed its own $50 million Series C with Sequoia. Both Descartes and Orbital are playing in the emerging market of geospatial analytics. These companies use machine learning to produce insights… Read More
from TechCrunch
Outdoor Voices, the ‘athleisure’ brand that wants to take on Lululemon, has closed a $9 million round of funding.
The round was led by Mickey Drexler, with participation from a few strategic partners including Walter Robb (former co-CEO of Whole Foods) and OV’s lead manufacturer. As part of the deal, Drexler will take over as Executive Chairman of the Board.
Outdoor Voices… Read More
from TechCrunch
Eko Communications, a U.S.-Thailand company that operates a messaging app targeted at businesses, has closed a strategic investment of $2 million to grow in Japan and expand into Europe and the U.S.. The funding was led by Japanese corporate Itochu, which provided $1 million and will partner to help expand sales. Existing backers of the company, which include Gobi Ventures, also took part.… Read More
from TechCrunch
SparkLabs Group started in 2012 with a Seoul-based accelerator dedicated to boosting South Korea’s then-nascent startup ecosystem. Now it’s going back to its roots with the launch of a $50 million fund for early-stage Korean startups that want to expand globally. Read More
from TechCrunch
Silicon Valley venture firm Social Capital plans to help startups go public without the dreaded IPO process. And it’s something different than what Spotify is doing. Social Capital is creating a shell company known as a “SPAC” that exists solely to merge with a startup. These types of transactions are not rare outside of the venture world but have little precedent with… Read More
from TechCrunch
Day two of YC S’17 brought us autonomous store checkout, cannabis genomics and at home fertility testing. We whittled down the strong day of pitches to just seven hot companies. These are the startups our writers and the investors we spoke with were most excited about. If you want to check out the full list of startups from day 2 you can read about them here. Additional reporting by… Read More
from TechCrunch
Finland-based ICEYE is launching a constellation of microsatellites with the aim of helping provide a view form space where traditional imaging cannot, with images delivered within a few hours using a technology that is typically very expensive and difficult to deploy. The startup uses something called synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) to observe Earth even through clouds and in darkness, and… Read More
from TechCrunch
On the ninth anniversary of the founding of Uber, its co-founder Garrett Camp shared the company’s initial pitch deck via a personal Medium post. The deck, and the short post, comes off quite sentimental because of how much has happened to the company since it was created.
But company growth and drama aside, there’s a lot to be learned from Uber’s 25 slide deck. Enjoy the… Read More
from TechCrunch
Laura Deming is not your typical venture capitalist. Then again, she isn’t typical in many ways. For starters, the 23-year-old, New Zealand native was home schooled, developing along the way a love of math and physics and, perhaps most interestingly, the biology of aging. We caught up with Deming to learn more about her path — and which technologies she’s betting on to extend… Read More
from TechCrunch