Refrigeration and air conditioning used to require vapor compressors, chemicals like Freon, fans, water chillers or passive heat sinks. But a North Carolina company called Phononic has developed solid state refrigeration technology instead.
Phononic, which employs about 110 full-time today, just raised an additional $40 million in equity funding to rapidly expand manufacturing of its… Read More
from TechCrunch
Browser-based website-creation service PageCloud announced that it has closed a $4 million Series A, bringing the company’s funding total to date to about $8.5 million. Participants in the round include early-stage venture-capital firm Accomplice, trade-finance agency Export Development Canada and angel investors like Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke, former SalesForce VP Avanish Sahai, and… Read More
from TechCrunch
Firefly Learning, a London-based edtech company that launched its SaaS teaching and learning support platform for schools back in 2009, has taken its first VC investment as it looks to accelerate growth of its user base — announcing a £4.5 million Series A today. Read More
from TechCrunch
For sites like Indiegogo, supporting a project generally means a pat on the back, a t-shirt, or, best case scenario, an early delivery of whatever it is that company is selling. Leveraging a recently passed securities rule signed into law by Obama some six months back (part of the 2012 JOBS Act) that lowers the bar on personal investments, Indiegogo is launching Equity Crowdfunding, a… Read More
from TechCrunch
Snapchat appears to be moving forward in its plans to go public early next year with the company filing confidentially for its IPO, according to a report from Reuters. In recent years, companies have begun filing confidentially for their initial public offerings well ahead of revealing their financial guts in the formal IPO process. That gives a time window between the SEC getting the… Read More
from TechCrunch
When Intel decided to take a crack at its first keynote at an automotive event, it swung for the fences. The company’s CEO, Brian Krzanich, took the stage at the Los Angeles Auto Show‘s Automobility event this morning to announce that Intel Capital would be investing $250 million in autonomous driving over the next two years. Technologies that will benefit from the investment… Read More
from TechCrunch
People hate phone calls and ignore emails, so how do you get them to protest, organize, fundraise, and fight for the causes they believe in? By talking to them like humans, one-on-one. This is the way Hustle motivates people to participate at scale, and how its messages reached 3.95 million voters on election day. Read More
from TechCrunch
Spark Capital, whose investments have included Twitter and Cruise Automation, has closed on $1 billion in commitments, it revealed earlier today. The 11-year-old firm, which has offices in Boston, San Francisco, and New York, closed its fifth early-stage fund with $400 million, down slightly from the $450 million it had raised for its fourth-early stage fund, which closed in 2013. Spark… Read More
from TechCrunch
Amid a growing number of video streaming services, Hulu today has finalized an acquisition that will allow it to better compete on user experience, by way of improved recommendations. The company has bought the assets The Video Genome Project (The VGP), which maintains one of the largest, structured databases of video content. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, and Hulu says only a small… Read More
from TechCrunch
GE Digital today announced that it has acquired Wise.io, a machine-learning powered service that helps businesses find patterns and trends in their vast data stores. At first glance, that may seem like an odd acquisition for a company like GE. It’s important to keep in mind, though, that with Predix, GE already offers its customers a service that focuses on helping them monitor their… Read More
from TechCrunch