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
GitLab, a collaboration and DevOps platform for developers that’s currently in use by more than 100,000 organizations, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series C round led by GV (the fund you may still remember under its former name of Google Ventures). This brings GitLab’s total funding to date to just over $45.5 million. In addition to the new funding, the… Read More
from TechCrunch
In the last two years, Unilever has acquired Carver Korea for $2.7 billion. Estee Lauder acquired Too Faced Cosmetics for $1.45 billion. CVC Capital Brands bought PDC Brands for $1.43 billion. L’Oreal purchased a trio of skincare brands for $1.3 billion, and also IT Cosmetics for $1.2 billion. E.l.f. Beauty did an IPO. Venture capitalists didn’t invest in any of these… Read More
from TechCrunch
Las Vegas-based data center operator, Switch, went public on the New York Stock Exchange today, under the ticker “SWCH.”
After pricing its IPO above the proposed range at $17, the company closed at $20.73, up almost 22%. The company raised $531 million in its offering.
Here’s how Switch describes itself in its filing: “We believe we are a pioneer in the design… Read More
from TechCrunch
“We’re actually out here trying to create value, not just give venture capital money away” says Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen. “It’s counterintuitive. The more the business works, the more cash it needs.” That’s because Flexport doesn’t ship bits, it ships atoms. Lots of them. Flexport is a freight forwarding logistics network. If you produce a… Read More
from TechCrunch