AI Medical Service, a Tokyo-based company developing AI-based software to help detect gastric cancer, announced today that it has raised a $42.9 million Series B. Investors include Globis Capital Partners, World Innovation Lab and Sony Innovation Fund by IGV. The funding will be used for clinical trials of its software, which looks for signs of…
What’s the opposite of a green thumb? Whatever it is, I have that. My house and yard are full of succulents not because they’re trendy, but because anything else I try to plant dies within a month. When I turn to Google to figure out why my zucchini plant randomly turned white and fell over…
StrattyX is a trading interface that lets you set up sophisticated “if-this-then-that” rules and execute orders on the stock market. The startup is participating in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. There are plenty of brokers that let you buy and sell shares using a mobile app and a web interface. But if you…
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. Publisher adtech startups Taboola and Outbrain merge in $850M deal to take on Google and Facebook The content recommendation rivals —…
Some consolidation is afoot in the world of advertising. Taboola and Outbrain, rivals that both operate advertising-based content recommendation engines for publishers — which typically appear in the form of boxes at the bottom of articles online that feature a mix of stories from the publications themselves, plus ads and sponsored content from other sites…
Two of Africa’s powerhouse tech incubators joined forces in September. Nigerian innovation center and seed-fund CcHub acquired Nairobi based iHub. The purchase amount was undisclosed, but CcHub will finance the deal out of its real-estate project to build a new 10-story HQ in Lagos, CcHub CEO Bosun Tijani told TechCrunch. Details are emerging on how the…
Say you’re a pharmaceutical company. You’ve figured out that a novel molecule could be effective in treating an illness — but that molecule only exists in a simulation. How do you actually make it, and enough of it, to test in the real world? Molecule.one is a computational chemistry platform that helps bring theoretical substances…
After committing to having a first crewed launch of its rocket ship in 2019, Blue Origin, the rocket manufacturer and launch services company backed by Jeff Bezos, is likely going to have to push that timeline back to 2020. Speaking onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco, Blue Origin chief executive Bob Smith said that the…
Multiplayer games are more fun when you get to play with the same crew regularly. Playing with the same people means better cooperation, deeper strategies, and, if all goes well, more wins. But what if none of your friends play the game you want to play? Rune, a company out of Y Combinator’s Winter 2019…
The FCC’s repeal of net neutrality rules has been significantly weakened by a federal appeals court, which ruled that the Commission could not preempt state laws like those pending in California. And although the repeal largely survived otherwise, one judge called the logic on which it is based “unhinged from the realities of modern broadband…
