India’s transportation app future isn’t just about Uber and billion-dollar homegrown rival Ola. That’s because Shuttl, an eight-month-old startup that provides air-conditioned minibuses, just raised $20 million from Lightspeed, Sequoia and Times Internet to develop its technology and expand its service. Read More
from TechCrunch
Uber China, Uber’s independent business in China, has announced this morning that it has taken a strategic investment from Chinese automaker GAC Group. Read More
from TechCrunch
We’re hearing a lot of chatter that Foursquare is in the process of raising a new fundraising round that will be a down round. The exact dollar value of what the company is raising, as well as the exact valuation of the round, couldn’t be learned but either way the company is looking at another haircut to its valuation. One source tells us that Microsoft, which participated in… Read More
from TechCrunch
Lyft has authorized a Series F round in which it could raise as much as $1 billion, according to a report by Bloomberg, citing a Delaware state filing. We hear that Credit Suisse is running the fundraise — the big banks are getting involved with some of these large rounds, sorting everything out amongst the many investors. Goldman has been handling Uber’s mega-rounds,… Read More
from TechCrunch
Microsoft is buying Talko, the mobile messaging startup founded by Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s former Chief Software Architect until 2010. The company says today the acquisition, whose terms were not disclosed, involves the Talko technology and the team. Talko employees will now join Skype, while Talko itself is being shut down. Ozzie, however, will not be rejoining Microsoft as a part of… Read More
from TechCrunch
2015 was not a good year for IPOs. In fact, it was the worst year for tech IPOs since the financial crisis in 2009, with more and more startups opting to remain private longer. Stock market swings stemming from an oil crisis and a delayed interest rate decision meant that some companies in the pipeline decided to postpone their IPO until 2016. “Investors in the market were looking… Read More
from TechCrunch
The Dell-EMC deal has had so many moving pieces since it was announced in October, it’s hard to tell the players without a score card. This morning, Pivotal, which is jointly owned by EMC and VMware (and General Electric) announced it was buying CloudCredo, a Cloud Foundry service provider based in the UK. The deal also includes stayUp, a log analysis company partly owned by… Read More
from TechCrunch
Administrate, the Scottish startup that offers a Sofware-as-a-Service for training providers, has raised a $2.5 million funding round. So far, so routine. But the company is also talking up a recent HR “innovation”: Its entire staff have moved to a four-day week, with no loss in productivity, apparently. Read More
from TechCrunch
Gusto (formerly ZenPayroll) is looking to raise $50 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange commission. That’s only natural for the startup, which is increasingly competing with the well-funded — and cash burning — Zenefits. So far, the company has raised about $22.2 million of its funding round, according to that filing. It looks like General… Read More
from TechCrunch
Chinese tech trends are distinctly different to North America’s but today, in a move that bears parallels to WeChat-only companies, popular messaging app Kik acquired the small company behind one of the most successful apps (bots) on the Kik service. Read More
from TechCrunch