Life360, the mobile application designed for families, announced today that it has acquired the private messaging application and Y Combinator grad Couple (formerly known as Pair), based in Mountain View. Not a pure talent acquisition, Life360 sees Couple as being a potential initial entry point into its larger platform, which now counts over 55 million families using its location tracker… Read More
from TechCrunch
Runkeeper is set to become the latest fitness startup to be acquired by a workout gear company. Jason Jacobs, the startup’s co-founder and chief executive officer, announced today that his company has entered into a definitive agreement to be purchased by ASICS Corporation. Read More
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BBVA — the Spanish banking giant that acquired Simple in the U.S. and last year made a $67 million investment in still-stealth mobile-only bank Atom in the UK — is changing up how it plans to invest in fintech startups in the future. The company is shutting down its in-house venture arm, BBVA Ventures; and it is taking BBVA Ventures’ portfolio, the $100 million fund it… Read More
from TechCrunch
Sky-Futures, the drone startup that flies drones around oil rigs and gas pipelines and analyses the resulting data to spot problems before they become a problem, has raised an additional $5.7 million. This follows an earlier $3.8 million Series A back in May. Read More
from TechCrunch
IMJ, a venture capital firm based in Japan, is looking homeward with a new fund especially for Japanese startups. Called the IMJ Investment Partners Japan Fund, it has already raised 2 billion yen (about $52 million), and will continue to seek new capital for a potential total of 6 billion yen. Read More
from TechCrunch
Toss Lab has raised $2.5 million in fresh funding for JANDI, an enterprise communication tool that is tailored for companies in Asia. Along with a previous seed round, this brings Toss Lab’s total pre-Series A funding to $4.5 million. Read More
from TechCrunch
Student.com, an accommodation marketplace founded back in 2011 (as ‘Overseas Student Living’ before rebranding last year) to focus specifically on the needs of international students, is announcing a $60 million combined Series B and C round today led by global investment firm VY Capital. Read More
from TechCrunch
This morning, the law firm Fenwick & West published new findings about all the U.S.-based unicorn financings that took place during the last nine months of 2015. It’s rife with interesting nuggets, but perhaps most fascinating is that in the fourth quarter of last year, half of the 12 rounds it tracked featured valuations in the $1 billion to $1.1 billion range — and with… Read More
from TechCrunch
CrunchBase, a service that surfaces information about startup funding, venture capital investments and people in the startup ecosystem, was spun out of TechCrunch and its parent company AOL/Verizon late last year. At the time, the new company raised a funding round led by Emergence Capital, with AOL/Verizon still holding on to a significant stake in the company. Today, CrunchBase announced… Read More
from TechCrunch
Not only has Gjirafa developed an albanian search engine, which overcomes some of the complexities and uniqueness of the albanian language, but it is also tackling the region’s search engine chicken and egg problem: much of the information that users typically search for doesn’t yet exist online. Read More
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