Apple is considering investing up to $1 billion in the SoftBank Vision Fund, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. With a fundraising target of $100 billion, Apple’s participation would mean that the world’s largest tech company would be investing in the world’s largest tech fund. SoftBank itself is investing about $25 billion and the Saudi Arabian government… Read More
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Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software was born with the best of intentions — to create a record of customer interactions. The problem, salespeople will tell you, is that it becomes a chore. Tact has been designed to add an intelligent layer to CRM — and today it got $15 million to make CRM easier to use. The Series B round was led by Upfront Ventures. Microsoft… Read More
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A wave of enterprise apps, from Slack through to Facebook’s Workplace, is tackling and changing how employees communicate with each other when they are both far apart and nearby. Now another startup in the same neighborhood as these has raised a significant round of funding to scale up. Dynamic Signal — which has built a platform that lets large businesses (customers include… Read More
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JetSmarter has raised $105 million in Series C funding, at a $1.5 billion pre-money valuation, to build its marketplace for private jet services according to Sergey Petrossov, the startup’s founder and CEO. The massive funding round will be used primarily for global expansion of JetSmarter in Asia and Latin America, Petrossov said, and increasing the number of routes and… Read More
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Microsoft Ventures today announced two steps that point to how the tech giant’s VC arm wants to get involved in artificial intelligence in a big way. First, it’s now going to pursue investments in AI startups through a special fund dedicated to AI startups that focus on “inclusive growth and positive impact on society.” Second, it is the first announced backer… Read More
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A Bozeman, Montana startup called Blackmore Sensors and Analytics Inc. has raised $3.5 million to build Lidar systems that can help vehicles see more details about what’s in front of them than existing sensors do today. The company spun out of a research and development firm called Bridger Photonics that developed Lidar systems for micron-precise laser cutting and welding, originally,… Read More
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Vancouver, Canada-based Mojio started out as a connected car gadget and platform that wasn’t unlike Automatic and similar services. That approach didn’t really work out for the company, though, and in late 2015 Mojio pivoted from targeting consumers to going after the B2B2C market with a focus on its platform play.
In the process, the company’s founder and CEO Jay Giraud… Read More
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Richard Craib believes that some of the best stock pickers aren’t on Wall Street. The former hedge funder came to the realization that tech’s machine learning experts may be able to build better predictive models than those with finance backgrounds. Craib carried this thesis forward when he launched Numer.ai last year, a crowdsourced hedge fund. The startup hopes to attract the… Read More
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Danish banking app Lunar Way is one of a plethora of startups in Europe attempting to update the retail banking experience with a mobile-first offering. Read More
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Southeast Asia’s Grab, a ride-sharing rival to Uber, has welcomed a new backer after Honda announced an undisclosed investment in the company today. Read More
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