Tesla today re-affirmed that the production of its next car, the Model 3, would begin in July — and that the company had $4 billion in cash-on-hand heading into the second quarter this year. Both of those are going to be critical as Tesla heads into the back half of the year, which reported its first-quarter earnings today. The company has gone to market multiple times to raise… Read More
from TechCrunch
A tiny bit more VC money sloshing around Europe. This time it’s the turn of Greece-based VC fund VentureFriends, which is announcing the final closing of a €20 million fund to invest in Greek software and “high tech” startups at the seed stage. The two Partners of the fund are Apostolos Apostolakis and George Dimopoulos, with Stefanos Katsimpas also acting as a senior… Read More
from TechCrunch
GV (formerly Google Ventures) is leading a $10 million investment in Abundant Robotics, a company building apple-picking robots that could eventually be adapted to harvest other fruits. Joining GV in the round were BayWa AG and Tellus Partners, along with the company’s earlier backers Yamaha Motor Company, KPCB Edge and Comet Labs. Read More
from TechCrunch
As the web becomes an ever more crowded landscape of things battling for your attention, we’re seeing an increase in marketing spend from companies to help capture it, and that in turn is leading to a rising tide for marketing technology startups building solutions to do just that. Today, Yieldify, a London-based company that builds tools tools to increase conversions on sites and… Read More
from TechCrunch
Cheetah Mobile, the Chinese firm that specializes in utility apps for smartphones, has enlisted the help of outside investors for its live-streaming service.
Cheetah announced this week that its one-year-old Live.me service has pulled in $60 million from a range of China-based investors that include Matrix Partners China, Evolution Media China, Gobi Partners, IDG Capital and Welight Capital. Read More
from TechCrunch
Food and beverage startups backed by tech investors are having a rough go of it this season, with Juicero all but melting down and companies like Memphis Meats, Urban Remedy and Soylent recalling products, according to required disclosures on the federal site Foodsafety.gov. Now, Hampton Creek Foods, a packaged goods company backed by the likes of Horizons, Khosla, and AME Cloud… Read More
from TechCrunch
Income inequality and disparity in resource distribution have drawn a lot of attention recently in the United States. Today, we’ll investigate a variation on the theme, exploring the distribution of a specific resource, venture capital funding, across a particular population, in this case, all U.S.-based technology companies founded in or after 2003 with at least one recorded funding round. Read More
from TechCrunch
Airbnb — the peer-to-peer platform where people rent accommodation and now do other travel-related business — has made an acquisition to expand its platform and how it works with developers to build services on it. It has acquired Deco Software, which had developed an integrated development environment (IDE) to build React Native apps, specifically with the aim of developers… Read More
from TechCrunch
L.A.-based venture firm Fifth Wall Ventures invests in startups that are benefiting from changes in the real estate market, and they turned to the country’s largest real estate companies to fund it. Read More
from TechCrunch
This morning Orbital Insight, a geospatial analytics startup, announced that it had completed raising a $50 million Series C round of financing from Sequoia. The fresh capital brings the company’s total fundraising to $78.7 million. Orbital Insight generates analytics for businesses using satellite imagery and other data. A product of deep learning and more readily available… Read More
from TechCrunch