Q-commerce is known for its tough unit economics and thin margins. Why is Jumia making a play? Profitability has been an ongoing theme for Jumia since it went public in 2019. Each time the pan-African e-commerce platform releases its quarterly financials, investors and tech stakeholders dwell on its adjusted EBITDA and operating losses. While the…
When Microsoft launched Viva last year, it framed the platform as an employee portal where you might go to find out parental leave policy or other internal communications directed more generally at company policies and culture. It further reinforced this idea last month when it released Viva Goals, a Viva module designed to give employees…
Brad Feld, a venture capitalist of 25 years an author of several books, has just republished a book that first came out in 2013 and to which Feld, with the help of coauthors Matt Blumberg and Mahendra Ramsinghani, has added quite a bit for this new, second edition. Called Startup Boards:A Field Guide to Building…
On the face of it, data from the first year of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s project to track the safety of advanced driver assistance systems look terrible for Tesla. Its electric vehicles were involved in 70% of the reported crashes involving Level 2 technologies, 60% of those resulting in serious injuries, and nearly…
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 that has been vertical search: providing tools to delve into very specific information silos for particular uses. And in the…
The construction industry in Kenya is so big that it is among the few globally that expanded amidst the Covid lockdowns of 2020. And it is not showing any signs of slowdown with the country’s data agency — the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics — projecting it to grow at an average rate of 6.1%…
Platform9, which bills itself as an “open distributed cloud company,” today announced that it closed a $26 million funding round led by Celesta Capital with participation from Cota Capital, NGP Capital and other investors. CEO Bhaskar Gorti said that the new cash will be used to drive Platform9’s go-to-market strategy and product research and development,…
The crypto sell-off of the last several days was preceded by staffing cuts at several companies in the business of facilitating the trading of decentralized assets and tokens. Reductions at Gemini and Crypto.com were superseded today by news that Coinbase is cutting more than 1,000 staff. Given that Coinbase and other crypto exchanges were high-flying…
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said today that the company will reduce its workforce by 18% — nearly 1,100 people — to “stay healthy during this economic downturn.” The crypto exchange, which went public last year with share prices touching the $350 mark, has lost momentum and is trading at nearly $52 per share with a…
The pandemic was a moment of truth for Amazon Robotics. After years of work, numerous acquisitions and millions spent, could the retail giant’s massive investment in automation help keep things running amid the biggest pandemic in a century? The answer was, decidedly, yes. The company’s deployment of hundreds of thousands of robotics systems across American…
