As the influence of technology grows in education, many have started to predict the coming obsolescence of classroom fixtures like textbooks, chalkboards, standardized testing — and even teachers. While technology will no doubt transform and replace some familiar pieces of education (for the better), the ideal outcome is not one in which teachers are replaced or marginalized, but one that… → Read More
You’ve heard this story before: Person sets out to find an apartment or buy their first home. Person struggles to navigate the noise of Craigslist, manage applications, impressions, notes, scheduling open house times, and find quality, searchable recommendations on apartments, houses, landlords and real estate agents. Person becomes frustrated and either moves to Canada, blogs about it, or begins… → Read More
We told you about a cool, futuristic, talking bear a bit ago, and apparently we weren’t the only ones blown away by it. Today, The Next Web reported that ToyTalk has raised $11.5M from Charles Rivers Ventures to bring this product, and more, to market. → Read More
If you don’t know about Startup Health and you’re a healthtech investor or entrepreneur (or at all interested in the space,) you need to rectify that. After all, as evidenced by the launch of another solid, differentiated health-focused startup accelerator last week, there is a lot of public, private and entrepreneurial attention shifting to the industry. → Read More
Dyn, the Infrastructure-as-a-Service company that’s probably best known for DynDNS, just announced that it has raised a $38 million Series A round led by North Bridge. The New Hampshire-based company, which was bootstrapped in 2001, focuses on providing its clients with DNS and email infrastructure services. → Read More
Coffee Meets Bagel is a dating site based around the idea that volume isn’t necessarily a good thing when it comes to finding romance. Instead, it provides one match per day, every day at noon. We covered its NYC launch back in April, and now the startup is announcing a seed round of $600,000 in funding, led by Lightbank and including Match.com co-founder Peng T. Ong. → Read More
Open Garden, a Disrupt New York 2012 Battlefield finalist, just announced that it has raised a $2 million seed round from a group of leading technology industry angel investors. The service, which allows Android, PC and Mac users to securely and seamlessly connect their phones, tablets, and computers in order to share their wireless data connections with others, has been downloaded more than… → Read More
Babelverse, the language translation startup that landed the title of “Audience Choice” at Disrupt NYC this past May, has raised a seed round led by 500 Startups along with a group of other angel investors.
Babelverse’s online marketplace provides speech translation services in close to real-time through a worldwide network of human interpreters. Today, Babelverse co-founders Josef Dunne and… → Read More
It’s been over two years since Box CEO Aaron Levie declared here at TechCrunch that enterprise is sexy again. Since then there have been a few strong enterprise IPOs, like Jive Software, Palo Alto Networks and Splunk, along with some hefty acquisitions, like Microsoft’s $1.2 billion acquisition of Yammer.
So yeah, enterprise tech startups are hot, if not sexy, and it makes sense that there’s… → Read More
Desire2Learn, a Canadian online education startup that offers an increasingly popular cloud learning platform for higher education, K-12 and Fortune 1000 companies, just announced that it has raised a $80 million Series A round led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and OMERS Ventures. The company, which is based in RIM’s hometown of Waterloo, Ontario, says that it plans to use this investment to… → Read More
Back in 2006, cloud computing company Joyent offered a lifetime subscription to bundle of hosting services for a one time fee of $500. Now, according to an e-mail sent to customers, Joyent is pulling the plug on those lifetime accounts. Customers are predictably upset, but not for the reasons you might expect. → Read More
TuneIn, the popular online radio service, just announced that it has raised a $16 million funding round led by General Catalyst Partners. Other participants in this round include Jafco Ventures, Google Ventures and Sequoia Capital. Sequoia also participated in TuneIn’s $6 million funding round in 2010. TuneIn tells us that it plans to use this new funding “to scale the company’s technical and… → Read More
Silk, makers of a free web-based personal database app, today announced a $1.6 million seed funding round led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with participation from Atomico, Anil Hansjee, Jens Christensen and Philippe Cases. → Read More
Open English, as its name might suggest, is an online learning platform that helps non-English speakers learn the language and speak fluently. After developing the foundation for Open English in his home country of Venezuela in 2006, Andres Moreno took his idea north to Florida, where he launched the program commercially in 2008. Since then, Open English has flourished. Today, the startup employs… → Read More
If you’re anything like me, your mood is directly proportional to the amount of food in your stomach. And when that food is terrific (and maybe even healthy, too), well life is grand. Yet, for a food-centric culture, we don’t give ourselves a lot of options. If you happen to work long hours, often by the time you get around to eating, restaurants are closed — or you’re exhausted and not… → Read More
It’s a good time to be Kickstarter. The crowdfunding platform has had a blockbuster year, breaking into mainstream consciousness with campaigns that raised millions of dollars, like the Pebble e-paper watch above. The platform has seen almost $275 million pledged to some 63,000 projects to date, with $231 million going towards successful fundings.
As Devin wrote at the time, before February… → Read More
MapMyFitness, the health and fitness startup that powers a community of fitness-oriented websites like MapMyRUN.com, MapMyRIDE.com, MapMyWALK.com, has today announced that it has closed $9 million in series B financing, which brings its total investment to $15.5 million. The round was led by Austin Ventures and Milestone Venture Partners, with new, strategic partners joining the round, including… → Read More
10gen, the company behind the increasingly popular NoSQL database MongoDB today announced that it has secured a new $42 million financing round let by New Enterprise Associates. This round also includes participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital, Flybridge Capital Partners and Union Square Ventures. 10gen says that it plans to use the financing to “invest in product development for… → Read More
BodyMedia, one of the growing number of companies that offers wearable body sensors, just announced that it has raised a $12 million funding round led by Comcast Ventures. The company’s products, including its BodyMedia FIT on-body monitoring system, currently focuses on tracking users’ activity level, but the company plans to use the money raised in this round to focus on products related to… → Read More
Paddle8, Artsy, Zazzle, and Art.com are all part of a growing contingent of startups that are on a mission to democratize the purchase, discovery, and enjoyment of art by bringing it online.
In August 2010, Boston-based TurningArt joined this cadre of art industry disruptors, launching its own unique spin on the democratization of art commerce with a Netflix-esque model that allows any and all… → Read More
Earlier this morning, San Francisco-based mobile app security provider Appthority announced that it has raised $6.25 million in a Series A financing round led by Venrock and US Venture Partners. Gunderson Dettmer also participated in this round. Venrock’s Ray Rothrock and US Venture Partners’ Steve Krausz will join the Appthority board.
The company’s product helps businesses manage the risks… → Read More
Startups do the darndest things. As you may or may not have seen, Y Combinator startup 42Floors made a bold and fairly unprecedented move today — as hiring goes, in any case. 42Floors Co-founder Jason Freedman had been following the work of UPenn sophomore Dan Shipper on Hacker News. The two had chatted a few times by phone and on Twitter, and Freedman was so impressed by the quality of Shipper’s… → Read More
Two years ago, when I first co-founded Earbits, I started frequenting various startup events like so many other first-time founders. Some of them were mixers, others were pitch competitions, and many were topic-focused panels and discussions meant to provide sage advice to budding entrepreneurs. I had reasonable experience on the ground floor of various startups but raising capital was a mystery… → Read More
BranchOut is officially going for the big time. The company, which makes a professional social network that runs on top of Facebook, is announcing today it has closed on $25 million in new funding, bringing its total venture capital investment to $49 million. This latest batch of money, which serves as BranchOut’s Series C round, was led by the Mayfield Fund with the participation of previous… → Read More
Subscription flower delivery Service H.Bloom, which once described itself as the ‘Netflix of Flowers,’ raised a $10 million Series B funding round today. The investment was lead by Shasta Ventures with the participation of a number of existing VC funds and angel investors, including Battery Ventures, Thomas Lehrman of Gerson Lerhman Group, and ShoeDazzle’s Brian Lee. Shasta’s Sean Flynn is also … → Read More
Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from Onswipe CEO Jason L. Baptiste’s new book The Ultralight Startup: Launching a Business Without Clout or Capital.
If you pay attention to the headlines about startups getting millions of dollars of funding from investors, venture capitalists, or partnerships, you might think the fund-raising process happens overnight. It all sounds so easy: Some… → Read More
BrightEdge, a startup that offers tools for large companies to manage their search engine rankings, has raised $12.6 million in a Series C round of funding.
The round was led by new investor Intel Capital, with participation from existing backers Battery Ventures, Altos Ventures, and Illuminate Ventures. CEO Jim Yu says that brings BrightEdge’s total funding to a little more than $21 million… → Read More
Instagram, the photo touch-up and sharing app, doesn’t make a penny in revenue from consumers, but it’s picking up users faster than you can click on a point-and-shoot camera, and the app is, well, just kind of great. Now, Instagram is poised to pick up another round of funding worth about $40 million, which will value the startup at $500 million, according to reports.
According to the WSJ… → Read More
Eye-Fi, the maker of those nifty, wireless memory cards that automatically sync digital camera photos to your devices, as well as to cloud services like Facebook, Flickr, Picasa and YouTube, is today announcing it has raised $20 million in Series D funding. The round was led by NTT DOCOMO, the largest mobile operator in Japan, something which hints at the company’s plans towards further… → Read More
Durham (a city in North Carolina) is looking to vitalize their already burgeoning startup scene by giving away the “World’s Smallest Office,” a moniker I once reserved for my attic bathroom but can now be rendered unto a bit of space in the front of a Cafe in Durham’s beautiful Downtown.
Although the office shown above appears to be more like a monkey cage than a formal workspace, the… → Read More
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