Deals

 Skyscanner, the Scotland-based flight search company, has been acquired by Chinese online travel giant Ctrip for £1.4 billion, or approximately $1.74 billion. Read More

from TechCrunch

 There’s no end to the bottles, packs, and pills of various nutritional supplements out there, but vitamin startup Care/of plans to stand out by tailoring the vitamins you pop to your specific needs. The startup joins a growing number of others in tech hoping to cash in on the lucrative vitamin industry. Elysium offers pills they say will boost longevity, Ritual makes vitamins for… Read More

from TechCrunch

 Apptopia, a startup that began its life as a marketplace for reselling apps before morphing into the app intelligence provider that’s now used by Google, Facebook, Pinterest, NBCU, and others, has closed on a second seed round of $2.7 million. The round, which was led by Ashton Kutcher’s and Guy Oseary’s Sound Ventures, brings Apptopia’s total raise to date to $5… Read More

from TechCrunch

 Everyone knows the basics of how to improve their financial health: put money into savings, track your spending, reduce your debt, look for ways to save on your monthly bills, and make smart investments. Where people struggle is translating that knowledge into specific actions you can take today. That’s where an application called Albert steps into help. The startup, which has now closed… Read More

from TechCrunch

 Co-working spaces are becoming a serious business in Asia. WeWork entered the region via China earlier this year, but there are numerous others across the continent. Singapore-based Spacemob is one such contender, and today it announced a $5.5 million seed round to expand its reach across Asia Pacific. Read More

from TechCrunch

 The SaaS Co., a startup that helps Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies with B2B sales, has raised €800,000 in seed funding, money it plans to use to further develop its AI-driven sales assistant. Backing the round are various unnamed angel investors, along with the European Union via a €300,000 grant. Read More

from TechCrunch

 Zola, the smarter wedding gift registry, has signed term sheets on a $25 million Series C round of funding, according to sources close to the matter. Sources say that Lightspeed led the round, and that Zola’s pre-funding valuation was at $200 million. Zola is an online wedding registry that lets couples choose products from a number of brands and even set up a cash fund. Guests can… Read More

from TechCrunch

 An early stage venture firm, Draper Nexus, has closed its second fund at $175 million, according to Managing Director Q Motiwala. Its debut fund closed in 2013, at $50 million.
Limited partners in Draper Nexus are global tech conglomerates, primarily based in Japan.
For its second fund, the firm signed up about 20 LP’s including Panasonic, Hitachi, Kyocera, Shimizu, NEC, Canon and others. Read More

from TechCrunch

 Google today announced that it has acquired Qwiklabs, a hands-on learning platform for those who want to become more familiar with operating cloud environments and writing applications that run on them. Qwiklabs, which launched in 2012, only focused on teaching skills for Amazon’s AWS platform so far. Given AWS’ dominance in the marketplace, that made perfect sense. Amazon even… Read More

from TechCrunch

 After Donald Trump’s unexpected presidential victory earlier this month, the tech community has been trying to assess how the new administration will impact them. There are concerns that there will be fewer H-1B visas for engineers, making it harder to hire the world’s best talent. People also interpret Trump’s stance on the Apple-FBI controversy as an indication that he will… Read More

from TechCrunch