Leadfeeder, a Helsinki-based startup that helps B2B companies generate new leads from website analytics, has closed a €3.1 million in series A funding. Leading the round is Dutch growth capital firm Endeit Capital, with Finland’s Superhero Capital and Vendep Capital participating. The Finnish company says the new capital will be used to further develop its…
Boston University grad students analyzed more than four million pitches from 11 seasons of Major League Baseball (2008-2018), and the findings aren’t great for human umpires. According to the study, umps made 34,294 incorrect ball and strike calls in 2018. That works out to 14 blown calls per game and 1.6 per inning. It’s not…
The popular TechCrunch podcast Equity this week launched a new series called Equity Dive, wherein a host interviews the writer of the latest edition of the Extra Crunch EC-1. If you’ve ever wanted to know everything there is to know about Patreon, the platform that connects creators with fans and their wallets, then this is…
After a couple of few rocky years, 2020 will mark a rebound for phone shipments, according to new projections from Gartner. But device makers aren’t out of the woods just yet. 2021’s numbers find things dipping yet again. The analyst firm sees the category experiencing a 0.5 percent decline for 2019. That comports with recent…
Octopus Ventures, the European venture capital firm that’s part of Octopus Group, is launching an £83 million growth fund to further invest in its most promising portfolio companies. The new fund, which is backed by a number of undisclosed institutional investors rather than individual investors, brings the total Octopus Ventures’ various funds has under management…
During my recent conversation with Peter Kraus, which was supposed to be focused on Aperture and its launch of the Aperture New World Opportunities Fund, I couldn’t help veering off into tangents about the market in general. Below is Kraus’ take on the availability of alpha generation, the Fed, inflation versus Amazon, housing, the cross-ownership…
While Spotify dukes it out with Apple and other big tech names to target high-end users in mostly developed markets, a startup out of China has raised some money to expand its music streaming business in the massive but still nascent market of Africa. Boomplay, a service founded by Transsnet — a joint venture between…
This morning, The WSJ reported Apple’s streaming music service overtook Spotify in paid subscribers in the U.S., and now it hopes to do the same in the Indian market by way of a big price cut. The company’s individual plan in India is now 99 rupees per month ($1.43 USD), versus the 120 rupees per…
Relativity, the Los Angeles-based manufacturer of 3D-printed rockets, has signed its first public commercial contract with Telesat, the longtime vendor of satellite services for telecommunications and business information. The deal marks the first agreement between a major satellite operator and an entirely venture-backed company in the “New Space” industry and is a huge win for…
Snapchat has found an answer to the revenue problem stemming from its halted growth: it will show its ads in other apps with the launch of Snapchat Ad Kit and the Snapchat Audience Network. And rather than watching as other apps spin up their own knock-off versions of its camera and Stories, it will let…
