A Los Angeles startup called codeSpark has raised $4.1 million in seed funding for web and mobile games that teach kids how to code, even before they know how to read and write effectively. CodeSpark’s games were developed for kids 4 to 9 years old, and with a goal of not just teaching them STEM concepts, but engaging boys and girls equally well. The games feature characters who are… Read More
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Helping businesses better manage gig economy workers is turning out to be a pitch with serious pulling power for Lystable, the UK startup which closed an $11 million Series A this summer, led by Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures — following fast from its $3.5M seed round last year, which Thiel’s fund also participated in. Read More
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Chat app company Line is investing in international opportunities after it announced that it is backing two VC firms: DAG Ventures in the U.S. and France-based Korelya Capital. Read More
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Line, the messaging company that went public in the year’s highest IPO to date, is diversifying its business and focusing on social after it invested $45 million (50 billion KRW) in Snow, a Snapchat clone focused on Asia. Read More
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Greyloft is a Singapore based startup running what it describes as an estate agency for the digital era. Read More
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Today, Skymind, a company developing an open-source deep-learning library for Java, along with tools for implementation, closed $3 million in financing from Tencent, SV Angel, GreatPoint Ventures, Mandra Capital, and Y Combinator. Skymind was previously a part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2016 batch and has taken money from Joe Montana’s Liquid 2 Ventures and a number of other… Read More
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It’s definitely not the sexiest platform play in tech town but b2b startup Paddle thinks it’s found an underserved niche — selling a SaaS ecommerce service to scaling SaaS startups seeking to offload the headache of administering international sales so they can focus on building core product. Read More
from TechCrunch
Back in June, Raymond Wu stopped by our New York office to show off what he had been working on. It was small and conical, with holes on all sides. It looked like a desktop speaker or maybe some startup Amazon Echo competitor. Turns out Wu’s company was getting ready to leap headfirst into the decidedly less sexy world of air purification. The hardware startup has the fairly… Read More
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Tink Labs offers a free-to-use smartphone for hotel guests that lets them enjoy free services, and gives hotels a powerful channel to engage their guests. Read More
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Othman Laroki and Elad Gil were sitting on Twitter’s roof deck after their previous company Mixer Labs had been acquired. Gil had brought a small hard drive with him — which happened to contain data on his genome being sequenced — and Laroki wanted to take a look at the data. That led to the the original hypothesis of Color Genomics: what if you could apply the same principles… Read More
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