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Wallflower wants to prevent cooking fires by making your stove smarter
The fire department responds to a home fire every 86 seconds, and many of those start in the kitchen. Wallflower is a device that easily hooks into most electric stoves, between the outlet and the stove itself, to notify users if there is risk of a fire. If the stove is on when you leave the home, the Wallflower will send a notification to the your phone to remind you to turn it off. In fact… Read More
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Node raises $10.8 million to find you better sales leads
The first step of any salesperson is to figure out who to pitch, but some of them are wasting time targeting the wrong prospective clients. That’s the premise behind Node, a startup that says its platform uses artificial intelligence to find sales leads. In “stealth mode” for the past 2.5 years, the company is now announcing a $10.8 million venture financing round. Read More
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Social media analytics company Synthesio acquires Social Karma
Synthesio is announcing its second acquisition of the year — it’s buying Social Karma, a company that uses social data to help marketers understand consumers. Back in January, Synthesio announced that it had acquired presentation software-maker Bunkr. Co-founder and CEO Loic Moisand told me that this is all part of a two-year strategy to buy up companies and technologies that can… Read More
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HubSpot acquires Kemvi to bring more AI into its sales and marketing platform
HubSpot is announcing that it has acquired Kemvi, a startup applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to help sales teams. A few months ago, Kemvi launched DeepGraph, a product that analyzes public data so that salespeople can identify the best time (say, after a job change or the publication of an article) to reach out to potential customers. It also proactively reaches out to… Read More
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Agtech startup Prospera, which uses AI and computer vision to guide farmers, harvests $15M
Tel Aviv-based startup Prospera has raised a $15 million Series B to expand the scope of its technology, which uses computer vision and artificial intelligence to help farmers analyze data gathered from their fields. The round was led by Qualcomm Ventures, with participation from Cisco Investments, ICV and returning investor Bessemer Venture Partners, and brings Prospera’s total funding… Read More
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Vacation home pricing engine Beyond Pricing picks up a startup for nearby comparisons
While Airbnb may have started off the wave of renting out a room in your house periodically to travelers for some extra income, that industry has blown up to include a lot of other competitors like VRBO. That’s led to many vacation rental owners putting their homes on multiple sites, which has led to the emergence of startups like Beyond Pricing — which helps vacation home… Read More
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Mobile banking startup Varo Money has applied for a bank charter
Varo Money, which provides a mobile-first banking product to consumers, wants to take on the big banks. In an effort to offer similar — but better — checking, savings and lending products to consumers, the company has applied for a national bank charter with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Read More
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Former Voodoo PC head Rahul Sood talks about the road to real token sales
This week on Technotopia I interview Rahul Sood, former founder of Voodoo PC and the current CEO of Unikrn, an e-sports betting service. Sood, who spent a number of years at Microsoft Ventures, started Unikrn because he saw the e-sports space was exploding in popularity. His company allows people to bet on gaming events and even bet on themselves as they get better at games. Sood’s… Read More
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Korean startup Urbanbase gets $1.8M to turn apartment floor plans into virtual reality
Urbanbase, a Seoul-based startup that makes virtual reality tools for interior planning and design, plans to expand in Asia after raising $1.8 million in Series A funding. Its investors are CKD Venture Capital, Magellan Technology and Capstone Partners. Read More
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Facebook acquires Source3 to get content creators paid
Facebook is on the cusp of a big push to lure independent content creators to share their art through the News Feed. But it needs to prove it can help creators monetize their content without allowing piracy to run rampant. That’s why it’s acquired content rights management startup Source3, including its team and technology. Read More
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SnapTravel raises $8 million for a hotel booking service that works over chat
Chatbots – automated bots that let you interact with a service or brand via messaging apps or SMS – haven’t yet become breakout hits, as a group. But that hasn’t stopped investors from pouring in $8 million into a hotel booking startup called SnapTravel, which lets users find and book rooms via SMS texts and Facebook Messenger. The $8 million Series A round was led… Read More
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BuzzFeed’s VP of Design on effective management and company culture that empowers
In this episode, Cap Watkins, the VP of design at BuzzFeed, explains how to apply design to any business challenge, what managers can do to create a more productive environment, and how companies can create a culture that empowers their best people. The job of a designer, according to Watkins, is to “make everything a little grayer.” Rather than focusing on only one facet of design… Read More
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BentoBox, the website builder for restauranteurs, cooks up $4.8M Series A
Restaurant owners have a lot of responsibilities and a wide array of skills to handle those responsibilities. That said, building a website isn’t usually within that skill-set. That’s where BentoBox comes in. The company, which helps restaurant owners quickly build full-featured websites for their restaurants, has just closed a $4.8 million Series A funding round. The round was led… Read More
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Hinge Health closes $8M Series A led by Atomico to ‘digitize delivery of healthcare’
Hinge Health, a startup originally founded out of London but that has since moved its headquarters to San Francisco, is on mission to “digitize the delivery of healthcare”. Beginning with musculoskeletal (MSK) disorders, the company is combining wearable sensors, an app, health coaching and peer support to remotely deliver physical therapy and behavioural health for chronic conditions. Read More
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The dream of Polish tech entrepreneurship is almost over
Poland has worked diligently over the past decade to become an entrepreneurial powerhouse. Once home to businesses focused primarily on app design and outsourcing, social, societal, and economic pressures forced the country’s brightest to start building for themselves. And they did. I’ve covered Polish startups for almost a decade, first on TechCrunch and then on a new blog I… Read More
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Helping students transition from the laboratory to robotics startup
A student at Monday’s TC Sessions: Robotics event in Cambridge asked me “How do I launch a successful startup?” I explained that I might not be the person at the show best equipped to answer, but I offered some simple advice nonetheless: find a problem that needs solving, address a need that already exists and don’t go offering solutions in search of problems. Oh, and get… Read More
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What it’s like to ship yourself overnight on Cabin’s sleep pod bus
Last weekend, I traveled from San Francisco to Los Angeles roundtrip on Cabin. When I arrived to the bus pickup location in San Francisco, a smiley attendant greeted me. She then proceeded to check me in and stow away my bag. Upon entering the bus, I saw the social lounge, where people can chit chat and hang out if they don’t want to go to sleep right away. I bypassed that area and… Read More
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Playbuzz unveils a new editor for writing articles chock full of interactive content
Playbuzz helps online publishers make their content more interactive by adding elements like polls and galleries. Until recently, those elements have taken the form of widgets that publishers can embed into their stories, but that’s changing with the launch of Playbuzz’s new Storytelling platform, where writers are creating entire articles, not just one-off widgets. Read More
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SF city attorney seeks court order to force Lyft and Uber to hand over driver data
San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera is seeking a court order to force both Uber and Lyft to share records on driver safety, disability access and other operations, in compliance with the city attorney’s subpoenas from last month. Read More
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Playkey raises $2.8M to fund its US expansion
Playkey, a game streaming service we saw earlier this year at Disrupt NY, has just closed an additional $2.8 million round of funding from Russia’s Internet Initiatives Development Fund (IIDF). Created at the suggestion of Vladimir Putin in 2013, the IIDF has invested in 293 companies to-date with the objective to strengthen infrastructure for Russian businesses. However, the investment… Read More
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