Scott Gottlieb, the former Food and Drug Administration chief, became known during his tenure for his efforts to regulate the tobacco and e-cigarette industries — and for his particular focus on Juul, the fast-growing e-cigarette company that Gottlieb squarely blames for creating a “youth epidemic” of e-cigarette use by teenagers. Indeed, when he announced that…
The Los Angeles ecosystem is $76 million stronger today as Fika Ventures, a seed-stage venture capital firm, announces its sophomore investment fund. Fika invests roughly half of its capital exclusively in startups headquartered in LA, with a particular fondness for B2B, enterprise and fintech companies. The firm was launched in 2017 by general partners Eva…
A San Jose-based semiconductor startup being sued by Huawei for stealing trade secrets has hit back in court documents, accusing the Chinese firm’s deputy chairman of conspiring to steal its intellectual property, reports the Wall Street Journal. In court filings, CNEX Labs, which is backed by the investment arms of Dell and Microsoft, alleges that…
The Boring Company, Elon Musk’s tunneling and transportation startup, has landed a $48.7 million project to shuttle people in an underground Loop system around the Las Vegas Convention Center. This is the company’s first commercial contract. The initial design for the project, dubbed Campus Wide People Mover or CWPM, will focus on the Las Vegas…
If there’s a special place in your heart for single-purpose utilities that solve a nagging problem, then you’re going to want to skip your daily Starbucks coffee and instead buy yourself a copy of the new iOS contacts utility Vignette. The new app is focused on doing one thing well: finding photos for your contacts…
While Android and iOS have locked up the market for smartphone operating systems, a feature phone platform that has the distinction of being the world’s third biggest mobile OS is announcing a hefty round of funding to continue its expansion. KaiOS, which makes the OS that powers devices like Nokia’s feature phones and Jio’s devices…
On Tuesday, Tencent’s usually low-profile founder and CEO Pony Ma made rare comments to weigh in on escalating tensions between the United States and China, calling domestic tech companies to build more self-reliance in a bid to stay competitive. “China has come to the forefront of development. There is less and less room for taking…
Daphne Koller doesn’t mind hard work. She joined Stanford University’s computer science department in 1995, spending the next 18 years there in a full-time capacity before cofounding the online education giant Coursera, where she spent the following four years and remained co-chairman until last month. Koller then spent a little less than two years at…
DefinedCrowd, the Startup Battlefield alumnus that produces and refines data for AI-training purposes, has just debuted iOS and Android apps for its army of human annotators. It should help speed up a process that the company already touts as one of the fastest in the industry. It’s no secret that AI relies almost totally on…
The best salespeople like to pride themselves on having both a sixth sense when it comes to closing a deal, and a healthy amount of persuasive magic to get a sale over the line. Now, a startup that says it can help any salesperson be like those top people, and help those top people be…
