TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin is right around the corner, and I’m excited to announce that we invited Threads founder Sophie Hill to talk about her innovative vision of luxury shopping. Threads is like nothing out there. It isn’t an e-commerce website with warehouses and and suppliers. It isn’t a marketplace website for second-hand luxury goods. It…
Heiliger Strohsack — holy smokes! Today’s the last day you can score early-bird pricing on tickets to Disrupt Berlin 2018. If you want to save up to €500 to attend the best tech startup conference in Europe — and why wouldn’t you — you’d better grab your wallet and buy your pass right now. The…
SOSV, a 20-year-old fund with $500 million in assets under management, has been running accelerators for years. Their oldest one, HAX, is the premier hardware accelerator in San Francisco and Shenzhen, and they’ve recently launched a food accelerator in New York and a pair of biology accelerators. Now, however, they’ve just announced DLab, a crypto…
Teamable, a provider of hiring software that leverages employees’ social networks, has brought in $5 million from new investor Foundation Capital and existing backers True Ventures and SaaStr Fund. The startup also announced its acquisition of Simppler‘s referral recommendation engine and matchmaking recruiting software. Teamable’s co-founder and chief executive officer Laura Bilazarian declined to disclose the…
Oracle is a traditional tech company that has been struggling to gain traction in the cloud, but it could see blockchain as a way to differentiate itself. At Oracle OpenWorld today it announced the Oracle Blockchain Applications Cloud, a series of four applications designed for transactions-based processing scenarios using Internet of Things as a data…
A huge shout-out to all the early-stage startup procrastinators out there. Our 24-hour clock is in play, and that means you need to act quickly if you want to save up to €500 on tickets to Disrupt Berlin 2018. And by quickly we mean by tomorrow, 24 October. That’s when the early-bird price flies the…
You may remember that back in March, the Water Abundance Xprize named the five finalists in its contest to demonstrate the sustainable and scalable collection of water from the air. Interestingly, none of those finalists were the winner — after one dropped out, an eliminated team stepped in and took the prize. The goal of…
What’s in a camera? A lens, a shutter, a light-sensitive surface and, increasingly, a set of highly sophisticated algorithms. While the physical components are still improving bit by bit, Google, Samsung and Apple are increasingly investing in (and showcasing) improvements wrought entirely from code. Computational photography is the only real battleground now. The reason for…
Gjemeni, pronounced Gemini, is a new furniture-on-demand service from founder Sean Pathiratne. The company offers decidedly tech-forward furniture that comes in a single box and can be assembled by anyone in a few minutes. Pathiratne sees his company as a fashionable and agile furniture company that brings stylish stuff to your living room in the…
A few months ago, Crunchbase News reported that a longstanding period of SaaS investment stagnation had come to an end. However, the investment boom times didn’t necessarily carry over to the seed and early-stage end of the subscription software businesses. The chart below displays deal and dollar volume of seed and early-stage venture investments1 made into companies…
