Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This was a live week on the podcast, meaning that Mary Ann and Alex and Natasha and Grace teamed up with the fine audio and visual folks from our mothership Yahoo to not…
Google said Thursday it will pay $90 million to settle a lawsuit with US developers that accused Google of abusing its power of app distribution and charging an unfair fee of 30% for app purchases and in-app purchases made through the Play Store. The company noted that US developers who made less than $2 million each…
Medical diagnostics company Visby Medical raised $100 million in a Series E round earlier this year. Today, the company told me it extended that round by an additional $35 million at the same valuation as the rest of the round. This financing will enable Visby Medical to scale production capacity from tens to hundreds of…
Everyone’s favorite versatile microcontroller maker, Raspberry Pi, just unveiled a handful of new, budget-minded products. The company is building on the success of its $4 Pico board, which has thus far moved just under two million units since its January 2021 launch. The new Pico W is launching today for $6 — the “W” (and…
Focal Point founder Anders Lilliveik has spent more than 25 years in procurement where he observed that the vast majority of business was still being conducted using spreadsheets and email. He saw an opportunity to modernize an industry desperately in need of digitization by applying the power of open APIs to get at data often…
India’s Lenskart is buying a majority stake in Japan’s Owndays, the two firms said, creating one of Asia’s biggest online retailers of eyewear. The firms did not disclose the financial terms of the deal, but a person familiar with the matter said the merger values 32-year business Owndays at $400 million. The 12-year-old Bengaluru-headquartered startup…
Y Combinator has announced Launch YC, a platform where people can sort accelerator startups by industry, batch and launch date to discover new products. The famed accelerator, which has seeded the likes of Instacart, Coinbase, OpenSea and Dropbox, invites users to vote for newly launched startups “to help them climb up the leaderboard, try out…
If you want the inside scoop on which companies are serious about addressing their carbon emissions and which aren’t, take a look at the public comments submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission regarding its proposed climate rule. You can tell if a company is serious by its stance on so-called Scope 3 emissions.…
If data is at the heart of any modern business, it needs to be easier to access and manipulate it without expertise. While there are many data analysis tools available including the sophisticated data science variety, and more line of business-focused BI tools, it hasn’t been easy for a person with little experience to work…
Kukua, a Nairobi- and London-based educational entertainment company and the creators of “Super Sema,” the first African animated superhero franchise, has raised $6 million in its latest round of investment. Tencent, which made its first African edtech bet in Nigeria’s uLesson last December, co-led this Series A round with Italy-based VC Alchimia. Other investors include…
