Zola, the smarter wedding gift registry, has signed term sheets on a $25 million Series C round of funding, according to sources close to the matter. Sources say that Lightspeed led the round, and that Zola’s pre-funding valuation was at $200 million. Zola is an online wedding registry that lets couples choose products from a number of brands and even set up a cash fund. Guests can… Read More
from TechCrunch
An early stage venture firm, Draper Nexus, has closed its second fund at $175 million, according to Managing Director Q Motiwala. Its debut fund closed in 2013, at $50 million.
Limited partners in Draper Nexus are global tech conglomerates, primarily based in Japan.
For its second fund, the firm signed up about 20 LP’s including Panasonic, Hitachi, Kyocera, Shimizu, NEC, Canon and others. Read More
from TechCrunch
Google today announced that it has acquired Qwiklabs, a hands-on learning platform for those who want to become more familiar with operating cloud environments and writing applications that run on them. Qwiklabs, which launched in 2012, only focused on teaching skills for Amazon’s AWS platform so far. Given AWS’ dominance in the marketplace, that made perfect sense. Amazon even… Read More
from TechCrunch
After Donald Trump’s unexpected presidential victory earlier this month, the tech community has been trying to assess how the new administration will impact them. There are concerns that there will be fewer H-1B visas for engineers, making it harder to hire the world’s best talent. People also interpret Trump’s stance on the Apple-FBI controversy as an indication that he will… Read More
from TechCrunch
The Climate Corporation (owned by Monsanto) has acquired Estonia-based farm management startup VitalFields. Terms of the deal remain undisclosed, although we’re told the VitalFields team will be joining The Climate Corporation. Read More
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Cogito, a real-time feedback platform for customer service agents, added $15 million to its coffers today in the form of a Series B. This brings the company’s total fundraising to $22.5 million.
The MIT Media Lab spin off is applying the principles of behavioral science to call centers around the world to improve customer experiences. Cogito compares the characteristics of a current… Read More
from TechCrunch
A Delaware filing has confirmed that Buzzfeed authorized $200 million in Series G financing. At $45.04, this is the same share price as their round last year, which valued the digital media company at $1.5 billion. Recode reported last month that NBCUniversal was talking about making another investment and it’s possible that this is what the filing is in reference to. The filing does… Read More
from TechCrunch
Sigfox, the IoT company based out of France that is building a dedicated, global network to connect, monitor and control devices like smart-home alarms, machinery, refrigerators and city streetlights, today confirmed that it has closed its latest round of funding, a Series E round of €150 million ($160 million). We broke the news of this round in October, noting it was likely to be… Read More
from TechCrunch
Sesame Ventures, the venture fund formed by Sesame Workshop and New York-based Collaborative Fund in May, has made its first investment in a tutoring platform called Yup. Specifically, Yup (formerly known as MathCrunch) has raised $4 million in a seed extension round led by Sesame Ventures, bringing the company’s total capital raised to date to $7.5 million. Yup connects students with… Read More
from TechCrunch
After months of speculations and rumors that the deal was all but closed, we finally have confirmation that DraftKings and FanDuel will merge into one company. The move is being called a “strategic merger of equals”. While the company isn’t yet announcing how the combined organization will be structured, we do know that DraftKings CEO Jason Robins will become CEO of the… Read More
from TechCrunch