Deals

 London-based Trint, a startup co-founded by Emmy-winning journalist Jeff Kofman, is tackling a paint-point I know all too well: the time it takes to transcribe an interview (or any audio) accurately. Read More

from TechCrunch

 It’s been a rocky road to glory for Discord, a startup whose iPad battle arena game, “Fates Forever,” earned it a top spot at our 2013 TechCrunch Disrupt show, but wound up flopping with users. What a difference a few years makes. After pivoting to a voice and text chat tool for video game teams and trash talkers in 2015, Discord’s current trajectory makes it one of… Read More

from TechCrunch

 Investors greeted ShotSpotter with a warm reception on Wednesday, on its first day as a public company. After pricing the IPO at $11, the stock closed at $13.86, or up about 26%. ShotSpotter notifies police departments about gun violence by using sensors that ignore ambient noise. Their sophisticated technology alerts authorities within 45 seconds of the trigger being pulled. It’s… Read More

from TechCrunch

 Cadre, a three-year-old, New York-based real estate startup, has raised $65 million in Series C funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. Cadre, which aims to make it easier for family offices, endowments and other moneyed investors to invest in real estate using technology, closed its Series B round with $50 million in January of 2016. It raised $18.3 million in Series A funding in 2015. Read More

from TechCrunch

 Whether you love or hate native content, revenues from traditional display advertising continue to decline for most publishers, and native ads are one of the few new revenue opportunities for them. Enter Pressboard, a native ad marketplace that today announced it has raised a $2 million funding. Read More

from TechCrunch

 Payments startup Klarna is ramping up its valuation again as it picks up a new, strategic investor. Last valued at $2.25 billion in 2015, the company today announced that Brightfolk, controlled by fashion tycoon Anders Holch Povlsen, is becoming a “qualified owner” of Klarna — that is, buying up at least 10 percent of the company. This is a secondary deal: specifically,… Read More

from TechCrunch

 Out of all the how-to guides ever written about pitching journalists, I’ve never seen one address the truth—that most are simply too busy trying not to get murdered by their inboxes to even open emails. Upbeat wants to use data science to create PR pitches that don’t automatically end up in the Trash folder. The San Francisco-based startup (formerly called PRX.co) launched… Read More

from TechCrunch

 As the cost of in-class education continue to rise, and the cost for computing continues to fall, we’re seeing a flourishing of startups that target the market for online learning. As one mark of the trend, one of the leaders in this space, Coursera, is today announcing $64 million in a Series D round of funding. Coursera’s CEO Rick Levin (who notably joined the company after a… Read More

from TechCrunch

 Roll up, roll up, there’s a new fintech VC fund in Southeast Asia town. Today, Thailand-based Kasikorn Bank announced its inaugural tech fund which is 1 billion THB, just shy of $30 million, in size. Kasikorn, which was founded in 1945 and is one of Thailand’s major banks, is calling the fund Beacon — think lights on top of lighthouses — and it is aimed at giving the… Read More

from TechCrunch

 I have an aversion to karaoke after the band I used to play in was entirely upstaged at a gig by a karaoke machine, but, as pastimes go, it remains a huge market. And where markets are big, startups like to go. Enter Finland’s Singa, which is building a digital karaoke service that, in its own words, wants to do for karaoke what Spotify has done for music. The Helsinki-based company… Read More

from TechCrunch