SparkLabs Group, the network of accelerators and venture funds that has now worked with more than 200 startups around the world, wants to foster the next generation of entrepreneurs with a new program for universities. Called SparkLabs Frontier, the program’s first accelerator will launch at Arizona State University this summer. SparkLabs Frontier-ASU is open to…
Sean Duffy is the co-founder and CEO of Omada Health, a digital behavioral medicine company focused on reducing costly chronic disease in employer and health plan populations. February’s Wall Street Journal report pulled back the curtain on just how much is at stake when individuals share their personal health information with health and fitness applications.…
In Silicon Valley, investors don’t expect their portfolio companies to be profitable. “Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies,” a bible for founders, instead calls for heavy spending on growth to scale in an Amazon -like fashion. As for Wall Street, it’s shown an affinity for stock in Jeff Bezos’ business, despite the…
Deep Science AI made its debut on stage at Disrupt NY 2017, showing in a live demo how its computer vision system could spot a gun or mask in CCTV footage, potentially alerting a store or security provider to an imminent crime. The company has now been acquired in a friendly merger with Defendry, which…
We’ve been writing about Abundant Robotics for roughly three years at this point. Now the SRI spin out is finally ready for primetime. Abundant announced this week that New Zealand-based T&G Global will be using its robots to harvest apples. Abundant says the news is part of a plan to be involved in year-round picking,…
While creating self-driving car systems, it’s natural that different companies might independently arrive at similar methods or results — but the similarities in a recent “first of its kind” Nvidia proposal to work done by Mobileye two years ago were just too much for the latter company’s CEO to take politely. Amnon Shashua, in a…
China’s Pinduoduo was all the rage in 2018 as the ecommerce upstart quickly rose to challenge Alibaba and raised $1.63 billion through a Nasdaq listing. Much of its success was attributable to its link to WeChat, China’s messaging leader. Now, another emerging ecommerce player that has leveraged WeChat is gearing up for a listing in…
Infinity Augmented Reality, an Israeli virtual reality startup, has been acquired by Alibaba, the companies announced this weekend. The deal’s terms were not disclosed. Alibaba and InfinityAR have had a strategic partnership since 2016, when Alibaba Group led InfinityAR’s Series C. Since then, the two have collaborated on augmented reality, computer vision and artificial intelligence…
In the space of a few months, MoviePass went from being the hottest startup on the block to a cautionary tale about growing too big, too fast. By the time the summer of MoviePass came to an end, the company that was going to permanently disrupt the box office was hemorrhaging money. It changed its…
Solugen, a startup that has set itself up with no less lofty a goal than the decarbonization of a massive chunk of the petrochemical industry, may be the first legitimate multi-million dollar company to start out in a meth lab. When company co-founders Gaurab Chakrabarti and Sean Hunt began hunting for a lab to test…
