It’s 2019, and most institutional money managers are still taking a wait-and-see approach to crypto assets, concerned in part about market manipulation schemes and other nefarious actors. Though a growing number of top establishments is beginning to kick the tires — Harvard just made its first bet on a crytpo currency, following an investment last…
LumApps, the “social intranet” for the enterprise, has closed $24 million in Series B funding. The round is led by previous backer IdInvest, and will be used to scale LumApps’ global sales and marketing and accelerate product development. Founded in Paris in 2012 — and now also with offices in London, Tokyo, San Francisco and…
Disney’s direct-to-consumer streaming strategy took center stage today at the company’s investor day. That strategy includes Hulu (where the recently-closed Fox acquisition has given Disney a contyrolling stake), ESPN+ and the Indian streaming service Hotstar, but executives spent most of their time hyping the upcoming launch of Disney+. The company said the service will launch…
If you’ve ever had a voicemail appear out of nowhere, there’s a good chance Stratics Networks was involved. The Toronto-based company is the self-proclaimed inventor of “ringless voicemails,” providing its customers a way of auto-dialing a list of phone numbers and dropping voicemails without leaving a missed call. The system uses a backdoor voicemail number…
Character is celebrating its 20-year anniversary this year, and this SF-based branding and design agency has a lot to be proud of. Founded by Ben Pham, Tish Evangelista, and Rishi Shourie, Character has helped startups like Doordash, Glint, Molekule, and many others, launch their companies into the world. We interviewed co-founder Ben Pham about Character’s…
Lemonade, the insurance startup founded by Daniel Schreiber and Shai Wininger, has today announced a $300 million Series D financing led by the SoftBank Group, with participation from Allianz, General Catalyst, GV, OurCrowd and Thrive Capital. Lemonade uses an AI-powered bot to digitize the insurance buying experience for renters and home owners. Users simply download…
Sometimes, reading a lawsuit, it’s tempting to pick sides, to judge who is more right than wrong based on its contents. But a new lawsuit involving two venture-backed companies — both of which are rooted in machine intelligence — makes both sides sound surprisingly careless given their line of work. The plaintiff is Quid, a…
Issi Romem is chief economist for Trulia and a fellow at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California at Berkeley. His work has been featured in the The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and more. The impending wave of San Francisco tech IPOs is substantial and will influence…
A bill intended to restore 2015’s net neutrality rules has passed in the House of Representatives 232-190, and will soon be in consideration in the Senate. The ‘Save the Internet Act’ may be doomed to an eventual veto, but its broad support among voters and the relatively bipartisan push in Congress make it an important…
Tunisia based private equity firm Africinvest has teamed up with Cathay Capital — a global private equity firm based in Paris — to launch a new Africa tech fund with a target raise of $168 million. Details are still forthcoming, but the Cathay Africinvest Innovation Fund will focus primarily on series A to C stage…
