Biotech & Health
YuLife picks up $120M at an $800M valuation for gamified, wellness-focused life insurance
12:03 am PDT • July 7, 2022
YuLife originally made a name for itself in its home market of the U.K. for its new approach to the provisioning of life insurance: Yes, sell a policy that provides…
UK launches antitrust investigation into Microsoft’s $69B proposed Activision acquisition
5:07 am PDT • July 6, 2022
One more hurdle up ahead for Activision Blizzard, the games giant behind Call of Duty that Microsoft is looking to acquire for $68.7 billion. The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority…
Transportation
Amazon takes a Prime step back into restaurant delivery in the US with big Grubhub investment and partnership
12:02 am PDT • July 6, 2022
Amazon tried but then ultimately stepped away from building its own cost-intensive Grubhub and DoorDash competitor in the U.S. back in 2019. Now three years on, it’s taking a different…
UK signs its first data sharing deal post-Brexit, with South Korea
10:28 am PDT • July 5, 2022
Six years on from the referendum where the United Kingdom voted to leave the EU, and in the midst of an apparent government meltdown, the country is announcing its first…
Quantum computing has been making quantum leaps of progress in the last several years — going from theoretical concept to multiple testing environments, to help organizations prep for a time…
Startups
Entrepreneur First raises $158M at a $560M valuation, adding Stripe’s Collison brothers to its list of backers
10:48 pm PDT • June 28, 2022
Entrepreneur First made a name for itself a decade ago in its home base of London, and then further afield, for the novel approach it takes to tech investing: Rather…
AI
Speechmatics raises $62M for its inclusive approach to speech-to-text AI
12:02 am PDT • June 28, 2022
Last week I wrote about an AI startup that’s building technology that can alter, in real time, the accent of someone’s speech. But what if the AI goal instead is…
Startups
Incredibuild powers up with $35M to boost its distributed, faster approach to games and software development
3:40 am PDT • June 27, 2022
Incredibuild, an Israeli startup that has picked up a lot of traction in the worlds of gaming and software development for a platform that drastically speeds up (and reduces the…
JobGet raises $52M with ambitions to be the LinkedIn for shift workers
5:54 am PDT • June 23, 2022
LinkedIn, now with more than 830 million users, has carved out a place for itself as a hub for the world of professional workers: a social network optimized for people…
SumUp raises $624M at $8.5B valuation, with its payments and business tech now used by 4M SMBs
12:05 am PDT • June 23, 2022
A decade ago, SumUp was one of the army of fintechs that made names for themselves with dongles that turned basic smartphones into card payment terminals. Today, the London-based company…
Media & Entertainment
Shopify breaks out of the website with 100+ new features including NFTs, local shopping and more
7:24 am PDT • June 22, 2022
Shopify made a name for itself in its early days with a platform for providing retailers keen to establish their own online shops an easy and quick way to build…
Featured Article
That agent who sounds like they’re from Paris, Texas? Try Paris, France
Our daily lives are more linked into a globalized grid than ever before. Products are sourced and shipped from afar; traveling to a place 3,000 miles away can be easier than getting across a big city in traffic; and information disseminates to anyone and everyone at the tap of a finger. A startup called Sanas…
6:00 am PDT • June 22, 2022
Enterprise
Personio nabs $200M at a $8.5B valuation as its HR for small businesses hits the big time
3:23 pm PDT • June 21, 2022
Personio — a startup out of Munich, Germany that styles itself as a Workday and ServiceNow focused on the small and medium businesses of the world — went on a…
Enterprise
Validio, a data quality platform based out of Sweden, emerges from stealth with $15M
6:27 am PDT • June 21, 2022
Data quality has been shaping up as a salient and increasingly critical part of the world of data science: Enterprises are sitting on growing troves of information, but it’s only…
Echobot and Leadfeeder merge, raise $190M in Euro sales tech consolidation play
1:22 am PDT • June 21, 2022
Sales and marketing has seen a huge boom in the last several years, fueled by developments in user experience and design, innovations around how companies can parse and leverage big…
Startups
Rohlik bags $231M despite the market cooling on food delivery startups
2:38 am PDT • June 17, 2022
The salad days are over for many startups in the online food delivery sector. Following a long period of cash injections, splashy and high-profile promotions, and interesting experiments toying with…
Fintech
Able.ai exits stealth with $20M to help big lenders speed up making high-value loans
7:28 am PDT • June 16, 2022
Large banks are stepping up their game when it comes to new services and the technology that underpins them, and in many cases they are borrowing straight from the tech…
Startups
AlphaSense, an analysis and business intel search engine, finds $225M at a $1.7B valuation
6:07 am PDT • June 15, 2022
Google showed the way when it came to the world understanding and valuing the importance of a good search engine to unlock all the information you could find on the…
Shipping and cargo services is one of the more fragmented and analogue verticals in the world of industry, with hundreds of thousands of businesses involved in myriad aspects of a…
TestGorilla scores $70M for skills tests aiming to replace the recruitment resume dump
9:00 pm PDT • June 13, 2022
Sending in a resume is the main way a person hopes to get noticed for a job. But a startup out of Amsterdam called TestGorilla is today announcing $70 million…
Startups
Prenda raises $20M led by 776 to build tech to run K-8 microschools
8:30 am PDT • June 13, 2022
Education took some significant twists and turns when the COVID-19 pandemic descended on the world. We saw a surge of new users, and new tools, around online learning; but we…
Startups
Spotify is acquiring Sonantic, the AI voice platform used to simulate Val Kilmer’s voice in ‘Top Gun: Maverick’
6:00 am PDT • June 13, 2022
Streaming giant Spotify, most famous for its music and podcast streaming services targeting consumers, is making an acquisition of a voice AI company to expand its reach in audio technology…
Meta’s Workplace supersizes its user base with McDonald’s deal
6:00 am PDT • June 9, 2022
Workplace was originally conceived and built by Meta to be an enterprise version of its flagship Facebook app, and today it’s announcing a new customer that speaks to that ambition…
Transportation
Shield AI raises $165M at a $2.3B valuation to fuel development of its military autonomous flying systems
3:59 am PDT • June 9, 2022
Technology built with defense in mind is getting some significant and serious traction at the moment, spurred by world events, advances in technology and a growing appetite from end users…
Startups
Backbase raises its first funding, $128M at a $2.6B valuation, for tools that help banks with engagement
12:00 am PDT • June 9, 2022
Larger banks and other financial service providers are getting a lot more serious when it comes to competing with upstarts that are disrupting their businesses with fresher approaches and newer…
Media & Entertainment
Juni jumps on $206M to help e-commerce players manage their own money better
11:03 pm PDT • June 8, 2022
The e-commerce market is on track to pass $5.5 trillion in revenues this year, which speaks not only to how much consumers are shopping online these days, but also to…
Startups
Multiverse nabs $220M at a $1.7B valuation to expand its tech apprenticeship platform
3:03 am PDT • June 8, 2022
We’ve been tracking a worrying trend of layoffs in the technology industry, but that is not the full story. There is, concurrently, a wave of organizations that are also in…
Fintech
Bud raises $80M more to expand its AI-based open banking platform, used to power lending tools and more
2:05 am PDT • June 8, 2022
Embedded finance — where financial services companies and others bring in different kinds of fintech technology by way of APIs to enhance their own offerings with more data and functionality…
Amid rising uncertainty about how financing will look for tech in the months and maybe years to come, one of the newer kids on the VC block in Europe is…
Startups
Go1 nabs $100M at a $2B+ valuation to upgrade its curated enterprise learning platform
6:17 am PDT • June 6, 2022
Online education continues to get a lot of attention in the wake of COVID-19 and the shift it brought to how people can learn. And to underscore that fact, Go1…
