Yesterday, we had the chance to catch up with Fabrice Grinda, a serial entrepreneur who co-founded the free classifieds site OLX — now owned by Prosus — and who has in recent years been building up his venture firm, FJ Labs. He often likens the outfit to an angel investor “at scale,” saying that like…
Wow, that was quick. When Elon Musk bought Twitter and took it private in October, I figured we’d have a while before things took a turn. Then, after he laid off about half the company’s employees, that estimate shortened a bit. Now, after last night’s Spaces brouhaha, during which Musk confronted journalists he banned for…
Companies spend millions of dollars to launch thousands of promotions a month, but they don’t always have insight on which ones worked better than others. And when the promotions are analyzed, it’s discovered that a majority of them didn’t help the company’s bottom line at all. Enter Kuona, a Mexico-based SaaS company using machine learning…
Fashion startup Virgio, co-founded by Amar Nagaram, former chief executive of Myntra, has raised $37 million in a new financing round as the young firm looks to build “a global fashion brand” from the South Asian market. Prosus Ventures, Alpha Wave and Accel co-led Virgio’s Series A funding, valuing the one-year-old startup at $161 million…
On Thursday evening, Twitter suspended a number of prominent journalists on the platform without warning or explanation. The situation followed the company’s decision to suspend the Twitter account belonging to Mastodon, an open source social media alternative that’s built momentum since Elon Musk took over at the company. Twitter took action against Mastodon after the…
In September, the FBI warned that more than half of connected medical devices in hospitals had known critical security vulnerabilities, and these flaws are leading to a surge in attacks on the healthcare industry. As Carly Page reported, MedCrypt raised a $25 million round to help device manufacturers think security-by-design when creating the next generation…
Microsoft will begin a phased rollout of an expanded data localization offering in the European Union on January 1, it said today. The EU Data Boundary for the Microsoft Cloud, as it’s branding the provision for local storage and processing of cloud services’ customer data, is intended to respond to a regional rise in demand…
Suplyd, a procurement platform for hotels, restaurants and catering (HoReCa) businesses in Egypt, has raised $1.6 million pre-seed funding from Endure Capital, Seedstars, Camel Ventures, Falak Startups, and a number of angel investors. Founded in January this year, Suplyd’s B2B platform brings efficiency in the supply chain operations for businesses in the food service industry…
A notable development for the fraught issue of cross-border data flows from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Wednesday: After two years of closed-door discussions, the intergovernmental organization has adopted a declaration on government access to data held by private sector entities. The declaration, which has been adopted by the 38 OECD countries…
The SPAC route to listing on public markets was incredibly popular in 2020 and 2021, but many companies that took this avenue didn’t exactly fare well after going public. So why did consumer car rental marketplace Getaround decide to list by merging with a blank-check company? To answer that question, we need to take a…
