Ingrid Lunden
Managing Editor, Global
The Latest from Ingrid Lunden
Boulevard books $70M to help beauty and wellness salons with their bookings
Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but when it comes to getting ahold of an appointment for your hair or another treatment…that’s a different story: The bespoke nature of a lot of t
Armed with $19.5M, LiveEO plots a big data course between satellite geospatial information and industry
When it comes to geospatial and mapping data and how they are leveraged by organizations, satellites continue to play a critical role when it comes to sourcing raw information. Getting that raw data i
Thoma Bravo picks up Ping Identity for $2.8B in an all-cash deal
After a tough few months in the markets for Ping Identity, the enterprise identity management company today announced a big move: private equity firm Thoma Bravo is buying the company and taking it pr
MarqVision grabs $20M to nab counterfeiters with an AI-powered IP protection platform
As of 2020, the clothing sector lost about $27 billion in annual sales due to counterfeits, an illicit trade that results in huge losses to both brands and buyers. Clothes, accessories and luxury goo
Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation to make building custom software as easy as buying off the shelf
The explosion of cloud computing, broadband networks, smarter devices and a vogue for building SaaS startups has created a universe of software for businesses and consumers: Whatever it is that you wa
LOT, the anti-patent-troll group, launches Adapt to tackle inclusion in the world of IP
Patent trolling, critics say, is guided by one principle alone: money. Yet tackling it remains a complex task with many angles. Today, a consortium called LOT — set up to help improve how the te
Meta Q2 sales decline 1% to $28.82B, EPS drops 32%, moves CFO to new chief strategy officer role
Meta, under the gun at the moment with regulators and investors, missed estimates in its Q2 earnings, but in an attempt to offset some of that, it announced an interesting executive shift: David Wehne
Seedtag, the ex-Googler-founded, cookie-free, AI-based adtech startup, taps $250M+ in funding
As regulation, platform dynamics and consumer choice continue to eat into the adtech stalwart known as cookies, it’s leaving a gap in the market for advertising solutions that can work well with
Spotify exits short-lived Car Thing hardware play, reports Q2 MAUs of 433M, offsetting Russia exit and service outage
Spotify’s push to complement its music streaming with a big move into podcasting and related content appears to be paying off, despite the ups and downs of operating in an uncertain economic and
Meta weighs downgrading COVID-19 misinfo policy to labels and demotion instead of removal
Facebook, no stranger to misinformation on its platform, attempted an uncharacteristically bold move as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold around the world: instead of merely labelling posts that discour
Messaging app Viber launches Payments, a new digital wallet for paying bills, money transfers and buying goods
Viber, the messaging app owned by Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten, has long been dancing around the area of fintech, launching services like money transfer and chatbot payments in various countries
Theator, an AI platform that analyzes surgery videos, closes out its Series A at $39.5M
When it comes to video-based data, advances in computer vision have given a huge boost to the world of research, making the process of analyzing and drawing insights from moving images something that
Amazon is buying primary care tech provider One Medical for $3.9B
Amazon’s interest in healthcare and being a major player in that industry is taking one big step forward today. The company has just announced that it intends to buy One Medical, a primary care
15Five, a pioneer in talent management HR tech, raises $52M to boost its own performance
15Five — an early mover in the world of building technology to help motivate teams, and to improve performance management for execs overseeing those teams — has raised $52 million in a rou
TextExpander, which lets users build shortcuts to speed up business communications, raises $41.4M, its first-ever funding
RPA, and companies like UiPath, swooped into on the world of work a few years ago as a catchy way for organizations to help teams automate and speed up repetitive business activities such as processin
Casavo, an Opendoor-style proptech from Italy, raises $410M to expand its instant buyer platform across Europe
Opendoor opened the door, so to speak, to the idea of applying technology to the concept of house flipping to both scale the opportunity and make it considerably more efficient. While its share price
Meta’s Giphy deal lives to fight another day: Competition appeals tribunal blocks forced sale on disclosure grounds
Facebook parent Meta’s been putting up a strong fight appealing the U.K. antitrust decision investigating and ultimately ordering Meta to sell Giphy, the GIF marketplace that it acquired back in
Ukrainian startup Preply beats the geopolitical odds with $50M to grow its language learning platform
As Ukraine continues to be battered by Russia in an unprovoked war that has sent hundreds of thousands of refugees scattering elsewhere, a language learning startup hatched by Ukrainians has found tra
Unity is merging with ironSource in an all-stock deal valuing Ironsource at $4.4B in a big consolidation play for gaming
Update: The companies have confirmed the news here. ironSource is being valued at $4.4 billion in the all-stock deal. Part of the transaction will also involve Silver Lake and Sequoia, the two largest
Meta launches Sphere, an AI knowledge tool based on open web content, used initially to verify citations on Wikipedia
Facebook may be infamous for helping to usher in the era of “fake news”, but it’s also tried to find a place for itself in the follow-up: the never-ending battle to combat it. In the