If you haven’t heard much about litigation finance, that may change soon. The practice dates back decades, though it’s been picking up momentum since 2006, when Credit Suisse Securities founded a litigation risk strategies unit that it later spun off. What is litigation finance? In a nutshell, the idea is to fund plaintiffs and law…
Automating agriculture is a complex proposition given the number and variety of tasks involved, but a number of robotics and autonomy companies are giving it their best shot. FarmWise seems to have impressed someone — it just raised $14.5 million to continue development of its autonomous weeding vehicle. Currently in the prototype stage, these vehicles…
The latest research from OpenAI put its machine learning agents in a simple game of hide-and-seek, where they pursued an arms race of ingenuity, using objects in unexpected ways to achieve their goal of seeing or being seen. This type of self-taught AI could prove useful in the real world as well. The study intended…
Fintech startup FairMoney is building a challenger bank in Nigeria. The company first started offering microcredit and now plans to expand to current accounts and savings. FairMoney just raised an $11 million Series A round (€10 million) led by Flourish, DST Global partners and existing partners Newfund, Speedinvest and Le Studio VC. FairMoney lets you…
Fieldwire, which makes task management software for construction teams that helps organize everyone involved in a project so things don’t fall through the figurative (or literal) cracks, has raised $33.5 million in Series C funding led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from Brick & Mortar Ventures, Hilti Group, and Formation 8. It isn’t a huge…
The We Company, parent company of the short-term real estate property management and development company WeWork and other We-related subsidiaries, is reportedly shelving its plans for an initial public offering. The company’s plans for a public offering have been hampered by questions about its corporate governance and the ultimate value of a company that private…
Canal+ wants to provide an alternative to the great unbundling of video streaming services. France’s leading pay-TV group announced that it will sell Netflix subscriptions starting on October 15. Instead of having to subscribe to multiple different services, Canal+ hopes that customers are looking for the ability to pay a monthly subscription for multiple services…
When Plaid announced its $250 million Series C investment, last year, it left out a couple of key investors. Today it revealed that Mastercard and Visa had also quietly participated in the round. For a company like Plaid, which builds APIs to enable customers to access their bank accounts inside applications in a seamless way,…
Julian Shapiro Contributor Julian Shapiro is the founder of BellCurve.com, a growth marketing agency that trains you to become a marketing professional. He also writes at Julian.com. More posts by this contributor How to get your ads working, and whether PR is worth it How to work with top influencers and avoid ad blockers We’ve…
“The Family” is a new documentary series on Netflix, based on the work of journalist Jeff Sharlet — whose books promise to expose “the secret fundamentalism at the heart of American power” and “the fundamentalist threat to American democracy.” Sarah Perez joins us on the latest episode of the Original Content podcast to discuss the series…
