alpha

Firefly’s Alpha rocket reaches orbit for the fourth time

Firefly Aerospace sent its Alpha rocket to orbit this morning, with the company carrying to space a payload from Lockheed Martin. However, the company has yet to update the public on whether it succes

Firefly debuts Elytra orbital transfer vehicle line, with first mission planned for 2024

Firefly Aerospace debuted a line of orbital vehicles called Elytra on Tuesday, as it looks to become an end-to-end mission services provider for commercial and government customers. The first Elytra w

OurCrowd announces its new $200M Global Health Equity Fund

OurCrowd, the global crowdfunding venture firm, today announced its newest fund. As the organization announced at today’s Clinton Global Initiative event in New York, it is partnering with the WHO F

Bond Pet Foods enters meat proteins phase with $17.5M Series A

The company, using precision fermentation to create “nature-identical” chicken, beef, fish and other meat proteins, intends to be commercially ready in two years.

Facebook is losing its grip as a ‘Top 10’ app as BeReal and TikTok grow

Facebook this year has been struggling to maintain its position among the Top 10 apps on the U.S. App Store, according to an analysis of iPhone App Store data. As younger consumers shift to newer soci

Here’s why a gold rush of NLP startups is about to arrive

Remember Natural Language Processing? NLP arose several years ago but it was only in 2018 that AI researchers proved it was possible to train a neural network once on a large amount of data and use it

Instagram is adding more features to its creator subscriptions test

In an apparent effort to compete with creator subscription services like Patreon, Instagram began an alpha test of a subscriber feature in January. Today, Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri announced an e

Kids and teens now spend more time watching TikTok than YouTube, new data shows

Kids and teens are now spending more time watching videos on TikTok than on YouTube. In fact, that’s been the case since June 2020 — the month when TikTok began to outrank YouTube in terms of

Flipping the sales script: How to break biases and diversify sales teams

Technology leaders don’t like to admit it, but sales has a perception problem that deters many fabulous candidates — especially women and minorities — from pursuing careers in tech sales.

Down bad

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AlphaSense, an analysis and business intel search engine, finds $225M at a $1.7B valuation

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 internet. The next iteration of tha

Open source data integration platform Airbyte launches its cloud service

Airbyte, an open source data integration platform for building ELT data pipelines, today announced the general availability of its cloud service. The company is also detailing its new compensation pla

SOSV and JetBlue Technology Ventures talk VC climate tech and ESG at TC Sessions: Climate 2022

Investment in climate tech is heating up almost as fast as climate change itself. In 2021, climate tech startups received $40+ billion across more than 600 deals. That’s more than double the capital

Google Cloud now lets you suspend and resume VMs

Google Cloud today launched its Suspend/Resume feature for virtual machines into general availability. Before it launched this feature as an alpha a couple of years ago, the only option developers had

Arcol aims to do for building design what Figma did for UI design

The company is building web-based tools that can turn a 2D sketch into a 3D representation so that someone can design anything from a small building to a skyscraper.

Orkes, founded by the creators of Netflix’s open source Conductor workflow orchestration tool, comes out of stealth with $9.3M

Netflix helped change the game for microservices when it developed and the outsourced a tool called Conductor, initially built to handle its own extensive, multi-channel on-demand video traffic (and c

Signadot promises developers faster feedback loops

Signadot, a startup that aims to simplify the development process for microservice-based applications by making it easier for developers to test their code, today announced that it has raised a $4 mil

Instagram launches early test of creator subscriptions in the US

Instagram is giving creators more ways to make money with today’s launch of Instagram Subscriptions. The feature, which was spotted hitting the App Store back in November, is now officially in e

Castiron serves up a $6M seed round to support ‘food artisans’

The pandemic hasn’t been easy for anyone, but the food service industry has been hit particularly hard. More than 90,000 restaurants and bars have closed, leaving workers unemployed in an alread

Yahaha Studios, a platform for building no-code, immersive games, raised $50M in 3 rounds ahead of its launch this year

The success of Roblox and other user-created gaming experiences like Overwolf have democratized the concept of making games and have taken it into the mainstream. Now, a startup founded by veterans fr
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