LightShed Ventures

Founder alleges that YC-backed fintech startup is ‘copy-and-pasting’ its business

A new startup lifting elements of competing businesses is far from unusual in today’s venture world, but sometimes competing founders don’t find the imitation all that flattering. Andy Bro

Y Combinator-backed fintech Pebble uses stablecoins to offer 5% yield on cash

As equities continue to trade down from recent peaks, investors are searching for higher returns. Some have turned to the crypto-based decentralized finance (DeFi) realm, where yields from lending and

Racket launches an app for 99-second micro podcasts

If it seems like everyone is listening to the same podcasts, that’s probably not a coincidence. Audio-based entertainment and social media is more popular than ever right now, but the medium is stil

Infinite Canvas raises $2.8M for a metaverse creator group modeled after esports teams

With the promise of an interconnected virtual world coming into focus and user-crafted gaming content exploding, Infinite Canvas is looking to apply lessons learned from the esports boom to the metave

Language learning startup Toucan raises $4.5M

Toucan, a startup that helps users learn a new language while they browse the web, is announcing that it has raised an additional $4.5 million in seed funding. As I wrote last fall, the Santa Monica,