Companies

 Rakuten has confirmed that it has acquired the assets of Bitnet, a bitcoin wallet startup it invested in, which will be used to create a ‘bitcoin lab’ for the Japanese retail giant. Read More

from TechCrunch

 Heap announced today that it has raised $11 million in Series A funding. We’ve written about the company’s “capture everything” approach to analytics before — it aims to collect data about every tap, swipe and other action that a user takes on a website or app. CEO Matin Movassate said this should allow anyone at a company to answer any question they might have… Read More

from TechCrunch

 Human’s team will join Mapbox and work on Mapbox’s mobile SDK and real-time maps. I’ve covered Human quite a few times over the years. It’s a well-designed fitness app that was ahead of the current trends in fitness tracking. Human turned the simple habit of moving around the city into human-readable data for yourself and your friends. Over time, Human started using… Read More

from TechCrunch

 Uber is making yet another big push in the self-driving car space. In addition to launching self-driving rides in Pittsburgh with the help of Volvo, the company is acquiring Otto and its all-star team according to a new report from Bloomberg. Otto has been focusing on self-driving technology that could be fitted into trucks that are already on the road now. In other words, Otto didn’t… Read More

from TechCrunch

 One of the few remaining universal truths is that healthcare costs are too high. Insurance companies are bucking under the pressure from the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and they are willing to try almost anything if it means reducing costs. With a shiny $8.5million Series A from Norwest Venture Partners, NextHealth will be making that exact promise of reducing healthcare costs to U.S.… Read More

from TechCrunch

 Part of YC’s Winter 2015 class, Instavest is a startup trying to turn investing — an activity most of us are used to doing privately — into a social activity. The site launched about a year and a half ago with the goal of helping average retail investors learn from others who have more experience in investing and the stock market. Today the startup announced they closed a… Read More

from TechCrunch

 While it seems like a new food delivery business launches or gets funded every season in the U.S., several have scaled back, like Sprig, or shut down entirely like Spoonrocket. Among those that have survived, however, are smart sites and apps serving the office-catering corner of the industry, a $20 billion market in the U.S. alone according to research from Technomic. Now, one of the… Read More

from TechCrunch

 While it seems like a new food delivery business launches or gets funded every season in the U.S., several have scaled back, like Sprig, or shut down entirely like Spoonrocket. Among those that have survived, however, are smart sites and apps serving the office-catering corner of the industry, a $20 billion market in the U.S. alone according to research from Technomic. Now, one of the… Read More

from TechCrunch

 Wheelys Café just raised a large chunk of equity funding on Swedish crowdfunding platform FundedByMe to expand to more countries and pour gas on its already explosive growth around the world. The young company has had an illustrious history already, with a stint in Y Combinator, a successful Indiegogo campaign and now a vastly overfunded equity crowdfunding campaign. Read More

from TechCrunch

 Acquisitions starting with a “B” are not uncommon in the tech industry in Silicon Valley. Roughly two to four billion-dollar deals have gone down each quarter (on average) over the last few years. The recent purchases of Cruise Automation by General Motors and Dollar Shave Club by Unilever turned heads for another reason —  the buyers were as non-techie as you can get. Read More

from TechCrunch