Brandless is a new consumer-packaged goods company that is looking to reduce the cost of grocery staples with a direct-to-consumer business model. Led by serial entrepreneurs Tina Sharkey and Ido Leffler, the company is launching with a suite of products priced at $3 each. To fund its launch, the company has raised $50 million from NEA, GV, Redpoint Ventures, Cowboy Ventures and Slow Ventures. Read More
from TechCrunch
Buoyant, a company founded by former Twitter infrastructure engineers William Morgan and Oliver Gould, today announced that it has raised a $10.5 million Series A round. Read More
from TechCrunch
Word spread late last week that data visibility and security startup DataGravity had been acquired. At the time, though, it was unclear by whom. Now we know. It was HyTrust, a company that specializes in securing workloads that run in private and public clouds. The details of the deal were not disclosed. Read More
from TechCrunch
Oh Snap.
The Snapchat parent had a difficult day on the stock market, closing at $16.99. It’s officially fallen below its $17 IPO price for the first time.
This is significant because it means that overall, public investors have lost money on the company since its March IPO. A money-losing reputation can be hard to recover from.
But for employees and pre-IPO investors, not all hope is lost. Read More
from TechCrunch
CompareAsiaGroup, which runs online financial marketplaces in seven Asian countries, has closed a $50 million Series B. The round was led by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group, and includes capital from new investors Alibaba, SBI Group, and H&Q Utrust. Returning investors like Goldman Sachs Investment Partners, which led CompareAsiaGroup’s… Read More
from TechCrunch
A $27 million fund aimed at applying artificial intelligence to the public interest has announced the first targets of its beneficence. $7.9M will be split unequally between MIT’s Media Lab, Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, and 7 smaller research efforts around the world. Read More
from TechCrunch
Effective today, any company can file for a “confidential” IPO, even if annual revenue is greater than $1 billion. This means that larger companies can now submit and revise financial filings, waiting until a few weeks before the offering to announce it to the public. Read More
from TechCrunch
With its Rappido subsidiary looking to become a marketplace for all sorts of online and delivery services, Movile is moving further along in its mission to become the Tencent of Latin America. Given its backing by Naspers (a large shareholder in Tencent — one of China’s e-commerce giants), the move to replicate a business model that’s worked so well for the investor… Read More
from TechCrunch
Though the region known as Silicon Valley covers dozens of municipalities, a few cities get outsized attention in tech circles. Everyone knows Palo Alto, Mountain View, San Jose and San Francisco as hotbeds for startup innovation. But they’re not the only ones. Less-talked-about cities in the region are also raking in funding. Read More
from TechCrunch
Vidcode, a Y Combinator-backed startup focused on teaching teens how to code, has raised $1.5 million in seed funding for its curriculum. While there are a number of learn-to-code platforms out there today, Vidcode’s approach is to make coding more interesting to teens by connecting it to their existing interests – like Snapchat filters and memes – while also allowing… Read More
from TechCrunch