The competitive deck appears nearly stacked against the startup, and it seems that every other month a new product launches from a major tech company that’s billed in the tech press as the next “Slack Killer.” What Slack does isn’t actually all that original as startup ideas go. It merely provides an environment for teams to share information inside a chat client. Yet… Read More
One down, many more to go! The first episode of TechCrunch’s latest podcast, Equity, our venture capital-focused podcast is out. This week, TechCrunch’s Matthew Lynley, CrunchBase editor-in-chief Alex Wilhelm and I sat down with investor and SaaStr founder Jason Lemkin to talk about Tesla’s $1 billion raise, the return of IPOs and recent acquisitions in the technology… Read More
An Israeli tech startup called Utilis has taken top honors at Imagine H2O this year, for technology that can detect underground leaks in underground, potable water supply systems through analysis of satellite imagery. Americans waste 1 trillion gallons of water every year thanks to leaky faucets, faulty sprinkler systems and other small systems. Utilis’ tech can find leaks to systems… Read More
Additive manufacturing startup Carbon is on a mission to help manufacturers and designers cut their costs, waste less energy and materials while speeding up the time it takes to get from concept to product on the market. The company, which has raised $221 million in venture capital, is firing up a new service aimed at contract manufacturers, and other high volume manufacturing businesses,… Read More
Glen Tullman doesn’t like it when someone tells him he’s sick when he’s feeling fine. It’s something he thinks his customers probably don’t want to hear, either. Tullman runs a startup called Livongo Health, which offers a blood glucose monitor accompanied with a service designed to intervene and help coach people through managing diabetes. Livongo Health helps… Read More
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman announced today that he’s joined the board of directors at Microsoft. This follows Microsoft’s $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn last year. When the deal closed, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said the company’s day-to-day operations would “essentially remain unchanged,” but he also noted a number of areas (like integrating… Read More
After unveiling a limited preview of Teams in November last year, Microsoft is now rolling out its collaboration and communication platform, positioned as a rival to Slack, more widely: Teams is now available, and free, for all 85 million monthly active users of Office 365, Microsoft’s suite of cloud services and apps as a web app and native apps for Windows, iOS and Android. Read More
Parker Conrad’s last venture at Zenefits didn’t end so well with his departure as CEO and the company having to re-orient itself. But he’s once again starting a company that will figure out how to build an employee system of record and management, starting off with smoothing out the process of on-boarding employees and focusing on other major life events for those… Read More
As the legal cannabis industry grows in the U.S., competition for customers is heating up. Now, a startup called Baker Technologies Inc. has raised $3.5 million to become a “salesforce for pot.” Investors in the new round included Michael Lazerow, Base Ventures, XG Ventures, Poseidon Asset Management, Phyto Partners, the founders of Outside Lands, and several other angel… Read More
It looks like Snap’s (at least perceived) successful IPO has officially opened the window: following Yext officially filing for an IPO this afternoon, identity management software company Okta just dropped its official filing for an IPO. After much hand-wringing about whether or not 2017 would avoid last year’s fate of an IPO drought, we’ve seen three IPOs all within the span… Read More
Yext, the company that powers location data in search results, has revealed its IPO filing. The business will be able to join the stock market as soon as April. The offering is said to raise $100 million, but that number is subject to change. We will get more of an indication in the coming weeks about how Yext plans to price its shares. With clients like Best Buy, McDonalds and Marriott,… Read More
Michel Morvan is the CEO of The CoSMo Company, a big data service provider and insight generator. He knows how to use AI to help C-level execs make decisions and he thinks the current crop of AI is just the beginning. Morvan doesn’t believe AI will become “self-aware.” Instead he speaks of “augmented intelligence,” robots that help us think better and make… Read More
On the heels of acquiring data science community Kaggle, Google is launching a machine learning competition of its own for startups. Google is targeting early stage companies taking an innovative approach to machine learning. The competition is being run in partnership with seven venture capital firms that include Sequoia, KPCB, GV, Data Collective, Emergence Capital, Andreessen Horowitz… Read More
On the surface, Astro, launching its public beta today, is a nifty but not completely necessary email client that combines machine intelligence and a bot interface to improve workflows and increase the signal to noise ratio of mail for power users. But the real story is that the startup, backed with a new $8 million Series A led by Redpoint, is gearing up to pitch enterprises on… Read More
On stage today at Google’s Cloud Next conference, the company announced a series of new tools to assist users with data preparation and integration. The updates bolster both the power and agility of Google Cloud for businesses. The first of these releases is the new private beta of Google Cloud Dataprep. Dataprep makes the data preparation process more visual. The tool includes… Read More
