Investment giant Prosus has written down the valuation of edtech giant Byju’s to below $3 billion, marking a steep drop from the $22 billion valuation the Indian startup hit just early last year. Byju’s is facing many “challenges” and Prosus and other backers are working alongside to aid the Bengaluru-headquartered startup’s recovery, Prosus interim chief…
FEBE Ventures’ name stands for “for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs,” and true to form, it is continuing to support seed-stage startups with the launch of its second fund. Targeting $75 million, Fund II is 2.5 times larger than FEBE’s first fund and 90% has already been committed. As part of the launch, FEBE Ventures also announced…
“When is a bot a person?,” my colleague Kirsten asked after I learned that Polestar’s climate bot is more human than machine. Polestar launched its “Truth Bot” on X (formerly Twitter) ahead of COP28, the UN climate conference overseen by an oil executive. The Truth Bot replies to misleading tweets about the climate crisis and…
Apple’s year-end review and answer to Spotify Wrapped, Apple Music Replay, has arrived, but it’s still no match for Spotify’s personalized look back at your year in music. The Apple experience — available via a URL at replay.music.apple.com — will show you your top songs, albums, artists, genres, and other information about your listening history…
Meta’s shiny new bid to circumvent European Union privacy rules — by offering users a false choice between paying it a hefty monthly subscription for ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram or agreeing to give up their privacy rights in exchange for free access to its social networks, meaning they will be tracked and profiled…
Amazon kicked off AWS re:Invent, its annual customer conference, in Las Vegas tonight with a few new serverless offerings designed to make it easier to manage Aurora, Elastic Cache and Redshift serverless services. Matt Wood, AWS VP, says that Aurora Serverless is great for getting up and running very quickly with a cloud database, but…
Terran Orbital is suing its former CTO, Austin Williams, a little over a month after he and other shareholders publicly called for a change in company leadership. Williams was a co-founder of satellite design and manufacturing company Tyvak Nano Satellite Systems, which was acquired by Terran Orbital in 2014, and has since become core to…
This was quite the year for the crypto industry. From funding shortfalls to the SBF saga playing out in public, the industry and its proponents had a wild year, especially with crypto prices fluctuating more than London’s weather in April. Still, regulation of crypto and how it is being set up to be enforced was…
ByteDance’s gaming ambition has been an expensive, short-lived pursuit. In late 2021, the TikTok parent’s plans for video games came into the spotlight after it became one of the firm’s six core business units, posing a new threat to incumbents such as Tencent and NetEase and rising star MiHoYo. Nonetheless, after two years of tepid…
EMotorad, an Indian startup manufacturing electric bikes, raised $20 million in a Series B round as it aims to disrupt China’s market domination and expand its presence in global markets. The three-year-old startup has raised more than $22.5 million in total funding, with Singapore’s Panthera Growth Partners leading the latest round, along with participation from…
