Andy Stinnes, general partner at Cloud Apps Capital Partners, leads early-stage investments in cloud businesses and serves as active board member and adviser, offering operational support for portfolio companies based on his 20+ years in executive roles in business software. More posts by this contributor Seed is not the new Series A It seems there’s…
If China once seemed to be committed to the free market economy, over the course of 2021, it has shattered that illusion entirely by abruptly disempowering its own tech companies and turning up the dials on media censorship at the direction of a president who, three years ago, oversaw the erasure of presidential limits from…
American technology giant Microsoft announced today that it will pull its professional social network LinkedIn from the Chinese market later this year. Microsoft purchased LinkedIn for more than $26 billion back in 2016. The news comes amidst a flurry of regulatory changes in the Asian nation, as well as rising tensions between the company and…
SumUp, a European-based competitor to Square, PayPal/iZettle and others that provide mobile-powered card readers and other sales technology to merchants and small businesses, has made an acquisition in the U.S. to dig deeper into that market, and to expand the kinds of services that it provides to customers globally. The company has acquired Fivestars, which…
There is an imbalance between demand and supply of general insurance due to the tedious workflow and processes that insurance intermediaries and insurance companies face. Singaporean insurtech company Surer, which automates the workflow and processes via a cloud-based platform, helps insurance intermediaries get rapid access to insurance quotations and insurers to distribute their products more efficiently.…
Facebook’s lead data protection regulator in the European Union is inching toward making its first decision on a complaint against Facebook itself. And it looks like it’s a doozy. Privacy campaign not-for-profit noyb today published a draft decision by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) on a complaint made under the EU’s General Data Protection…
Update: The round in question was $135 million, not $100 million as originally noted. I apologize for the mistake! What do you call AI these days? ML in a suit. ML, or machine learning, is a big market today. That is thanks to modern corporations accreting data like hoarders and data science maturing as a…
CarDekho, an Indian search and e-commerce platform for new and used cars, has become the latest startup in the world’s second-largest market to reach the unicorn status. The 14-year-old startup said on Wednesday it has raised $250 million — $200 million in equity and $50 million in debt — in its Series E financing round.…
The startup myth goes something like this: You launch a startup in your dorm room, get into Y Combinator, find product-market fit, experience hockey-stick growth, raise some funding and expand the platform. Somehow your revenue hurtles toward $100 million and the company valuation flies to $1 billion. All’s right with the world. In reality, though,…
Alviere, an embedded finance startup that aims to help any brand deliver financial products and services to its customers and employees, announced today it has closed $70 million of new funding. In April, New York-based Alviere closed a $20 million Series A led by Viola Ventures and Viola Fintech, with the participation of CommerzVentures, Mitsubishi…
