SoftBank’s Vision Fund has finally made a good tech investment around real estate. After investing $4.4 billion in what is essentially a bespoke office space rental business (WeWork) and another $450 million in Zillow for rich people (Compass), the gargantuan Japanese tech investor is leading a $120 million round of funding for Lemonade, a startup providing renters and homeowners insurance. Read More
from TechCrunch
Dgraph is an increasingly popular open-source distributed graph database that uses a version of Facebook’s GraphQL as its default query language. Today, the company announced that it has raised $3 million in funding from (this includes a $1.1 million seed round raised last year). In addition, the company announced that its flagship database has hit the 1.0 stage. Read More
from TechCrunch
On the heels of Lemonade raising $120 million from Softbank for its new “peer-to-peer” spin on insurance services, another company aimed at disrupting the insurance market is announcing a major round of its own. Bima, a European startup that builds and sells “microinsurance” services for low-income consumers in Africa, Asia and Latin America, has raised $96.6 million in… Read More
from TechCrunch
While some financial derivatives like futures trading are slowly coming to Bitcoin, we’re still a long time away from these financial products being widely available for the entire cryptocurrency asset class.
So dydX is building a decentralized protocol for derivatives, built on the Ethereum blockchain and the 0x protocol. The protocol lets you take out peer-to-peer short sells, long… Read More
from TechCrunch
InVision, the platform for creation and collaboration among designers, has today announced the launch of the InVision Fund. Led by CEO Clark Valberg, the company is designating $5 million to invest in startups working in the design space. “The world is giving birth to all of these little design tools meant to make the world of design better,” said Valberg. “We think of… Read More
from TechCrunch
When DigitalGenius participated in the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield competition in New York City in 2015, there weren’t a lot of companies working on AI and machine learning. Today, it’s become much more commonplace, and the company announced a $14.75 million Series A. Global Founders Capital led the round. MMC Ventures, Paua Ventures and several other unnamed new investors… Read More
from TechCrunch
Ola, the Uber rival in India, is entering the food delivery space after it announced a deal to acquire Foodpanda’s India business from its parent company DeliveryHero. The deal will see Ola scoop up the Foodpanda India business with DeliveryHero taking an undisclosed amount of Ola stock in exchange. Undisclosed all-stock deals are usually indicative of a willingness to sell, and we… Read More
from TechCrunch
AxleHire, a last-mile logistics startup that facilitates deliveries for companies like HelloFresh, Freshly, Sunbasket, La Boulangerie and others, has raised $4.3 million from Acorn Pacific, RGA Ventures and others. Read More
from TechCrunch
Springboard is a platform that helps people advance their tech skills, and ultimately career. Today it took a step further to realizing its own potential after it landed a $9.5 million Series A round to develop specialisms. I wrote about the U.S.-based service nearly two years ago when it was just starting out and it had gobbled up a $1.7 million seed round. Then, Springboard had brought… Read More
from TechCrunch
Quinyx, a Stockholm-headquartered company that offers cloud-based software to help businesses manage things like employee scheduling, communication, task-management and payroll integration, has raised a further $12 million in funding. Backing the round is VC firm Battery Ventures, which sees Boston-based Battery General Partner Michael Brown join the Quinyx board. Read More
from TechCrunch