The gig economy has been under much scrutiny as of late due to the way it pays — or, skirts around paying — its independent contractors. Thumbtack, a platform for finding professionals to do anything from home maintenance do DJing a party, is now offering benefits to some of its independent contractors. “In a time […]

Kairos, the facial recognition startup that found itself in turmoil following the ouster of founder and then-CEO Brian Brackeen last October, has raised $4 million in funding from E. Jay Saunders, CEO of Domus Semo Sancus. This brings Kairos’s total funding to $17 million. As of November, Kairos had just enough money to get through […]

Twitter has announced it’s expanding checks on political advertisers outside the U.S. to also cover Australia, India and all the member states of the European Union. This means anyone wanting to run political ads on its platform in those regions will first need to go through its certification process to prove their identity and certify […]

Some interesting M&A is afoot in the world of hardware and software that’s aiming to improve the quality of audio and video communications over digital networks. GN Group — the Danish company that broke new ground in mobile when it inked deals first with Apple and then Google to stream audio from their phones directly […]

SendBird, a San Francisco area startup, helps developers add messaging to their apps with a couple of lines of code. It’s an idea similar to Stripe for payments or Twilio for communications. Today, the company announced a $52 million Series B investment. The round was led by Iconiq Capital. Existing investors Shasta Ventures, August Capital, […]

Redis Labs, a startup that offers commercial services around the Redis in-memory data store (and which counts Redis creator and lead developer Salvatore Sanfilippo among its employees), today announced that it has raised a $60 million Series E funding round led by private equity firm Francisco Partners. The firm didn’t participate in any of Redis […]

Last year, Sphero stepped away from the flashiness of Disney IP, opting instead to focus on education. It was a pragmatic business decision, above all. The draw of licensing brands like Star Wars, Marvel and Pixar was clear, but the grind ultimately proved too much for the Colorado startup. Besides, products like the Bolt and […]

There can be little doubt that 5G is going to take center stage at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. After years of hype without any real products, this is finally going to be the year that 5G — and especially 5G phones — will become available. 5G phones obviously need 5G modems, so […]

Coinbase, the world’s most valuable crypto company, is gearing up to add more cryptocurrencies to its exchange thanks to its latest acquisition. We already know the firm wants to a glut of new crypto assets, but today it announced it has snapped up blockchain intelligence startup Neutrino in an undisclosed deal that seemed destined to […]

Darktrace helped pave the way for using artificial intelligence to combat malicious hacking and enterprise security breaches. Now a new UK startup founded by an ex-Darktrace executive has raised some funding to take the use of AI in cybersecurity to the next level. Senseon, which has pioneered a new model that it calls “AI triangulation” — simultaneously […]

You’d be forgiven for not knowing Amazon has operated in China for more than a decade, but perhaps not for much longer. The company is reportedly in talks to merge its China-based import business with local peer Kaola, the cross-border shopping platform run by Chinese internet behemoth NetEase, Caijing reported (link in Chinese) on Tuesday. The deal, […]

The money is starting to flow from India’s largest startup exit. Ola has added a major name to its ongoing financing round after it confirmed that Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal has invested 650 crore INR (around $92 million) into the Indian ride-hailing business. The deal rumored in January when Paper.vc, an intelligence service that sifts through company […]

Eight years after raising its first $30 million fund, 212 is back in the market with a $30 million first close for its latest fund focused on investments in Turkish and Eastern European startups.  Looking to invest in business-to-business software as a service startups, financial services technologies, and marketplace businesses, the firm has already launched four […]

Meet Metronaut, an app for smartphones and tablets that could change the way you play classical music. The startup behind the app, Antescofo, raised a $4.5 million funding round (€4 million) and has attracted 160,000 downloads. Daphni and OneRagTime are leading the round, with Nobuyuki Idei, Yann LeCun, Sophie Gasperment and Thibault Viort also participating. […]