Michael Grimes has been called “Wall Street’s Silicon Valley whisperer” for landing a seemingly endless string of coveted deals for his bank, Morgan Stanley. In more recent years, it has served as the lead underwriter for Facebook, Uber, Spotify and Slack. Grimes, who has been a banker for 32 years — 25 of them at…
Google has joined Twitter in revising its political ad rules ahead of what promises to be a brutal election season. But while the latter chose to ban political advertising altogether, Google is mainly limiting the ability to target political demographics, and promises to take action against “demonstrably false claims.” In a blog post Wednesday afternoon,…
The Mercedes-Benz EQC 400 4MATIC, the German automaker’s first all-electric vehicle under its new EQ brand, will start at $67,900 when it arrives in the U.S. early next year. Mercedes-Benz announced Wednesday the price of the EQC 400 at the LA Auto Show. The price, which doesn’t account for the $7,500 federal tax credit, is…
Online privacy is facing a new challenge: A first-party tracker that appears to be unblockable with standard privacy tools such as adblockers. The tracker in question was spotted being deployed by French national newspaper, Liberation, which in October promised subscribers an entirely tracker-free experience. That promise garnered it a bunch of attention from privacy experts…
Can cloud kitchens take off in India? Swiggy, one of the country’s largest food delivery startups, is betting on it. The Prosus Ventures-backed startup said on Wednesday it has established 1,000 cloud kitchens for its restaurant partners in the country — more than any of its local rivals. The Bangalore-headquartered firm said it has invested…
With Jinx, three former members of the Casper team are looking to bring what CEO Terri Rockovich called “the Casper playbook” to selling dog food. The startup has raised $5.65 million from an all-star list of investors including Alexis Ohanian of Initialized Capital, Align Ventures, Brand Foundry, Wheelhouse Group, Will Smith and his family, the…
Clumio, a 100-people startup that offers a SaaS-like service for enterprise backup, today announced that it has raised a $135 million Series C round, led by existing investor Sutter Hill Ventures and new investor Altimeter Captial. The announcement comes shortly after the company’s disclosure in August that it had quietly raised a total of $51…
When the Los Angeles-based startup Maslo launched its first product in early 2018, the company was focused on a direct-to-consumer tool designed to encourage mindfulness and self-awareness through a machine learning enabled avatar that would respond to individual’s inputs. Now the company has reframed its offering, raised a fresh round of financing and is coming…
Playbuzz, a startup that helps publishers to add things like polls and galleries to their articles, has rebranded itself as Ex.co. Co-founder and CEO Tom Pachys told me the name stands for “the experience company,” and he said it reflects the company’s broader content marketing ambitions. Ex.co will continue working with news publishers, but Pachys…
Spending for consumer digital healthcare companies is set to explode in the next few years; the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology is currently reviewing the requirements for data sharing with the Department of Health and Human Services, and their initiatives will unlock a wave of data access never before seen in…
