-
Meet the 17th class of 500 Startups companies
500 Startups’ 16th demo day just wrapped up, and the firm is already turning its eyes to its next batch of companies. More than 40 startups are participating in this batch of companies. From softer baby products to tools for creating and distributing vertical videos (a big focus given the shift on many mobile platforms), there’s something that might pique pretty much… Read More
-
Slay squad goals, not just tasks, with Lattice
You know what to do at work today, but do you know why? Goals. Having clear goals is critical to keeping productivity and morale high on any team. Whether it’s a launch date, level of traction, sales quota or hiring objective, teams perform better with well-defined motives. Lattice weaves goals into your workflow. Built by Y Combinator president Sam Altman’s brother Jack, Lattice… Read More
-
Jeremy Hitchcock steps down as CEO of Dyn
Just a day after announcing a $50 million round of funding, Internet performance management company Dyn is revealing there’s been a change in leadership — co-founder Jeremy Hitchcock is stepping down as CEO. “I’ve done a nice and effective job of getting the company from A to B, but now I’m thinking about helping the company get from B to C,” Hitchcock told me. Read More
-
Weaveworks grabs $15 million Series B from GV to bring order to containerization
Weaveworks announced a $15 million Series B round today led by GV (the artist formerly known as Google Ventures). Accel, which invested in its earlier $5 million Series A also participated. The company has raised $20 million so far with this round. Weaveworks has created a set of open source tools for managing, monitoring and securing containers, the latest hot technology for developers… Read More
-
Customer support via SMS is about to get a lot easier, courtesy of Zendesk
Customer support powerhouse Zendesk is broadening its ever-expanding number of support channels today, as the company announced a brand new native channel for customer service over the text messages. SMS may be 20-year-old technology, but there’s a lot to be said for short bursts of asynchronous exchange of information. Read More
-
Slack debuts ‘Sign in with Slack,’ the work chat platform’s answer to Facebook Login
Slack is pushing to become the identity layer for all enterprise apps. The workplace chat app has already captured the eyes, minds (and wallets) of the tech world with its deceptively simple, zippy platform for people to communicate and collaborate with each other on projects. One of its chief hooks is the ease with which you can integrate lots of different apps so that you can communicate… Read More
-
Dyn raises $50M more to help your favorite websites stay fast and secure
Internet performance management company Dyn has raised $50 million in Series B funding. Dyn was founded back in 2001, with its first product being a DNS service called DynDNS. Over time, it’s expanded into a broader suite of products that allow companies including Pfizer, Visa, Netflix and Twitter to monitor their online availability, security and speed. In addition to the funding… Read More
-
How Foursquare hopes to hit profitability
Foursquare’s business looks a whole lot different than it used to. New CEO Jeff Glueck and co-founder Dennis Crowley know it — and they still have a plan to hit $100 million in revenue, and profitability, in the next few years. They talked about some of their efforts, like focusing on building new tools for businesses that can help them grow, onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt… Read More
-
Pivotal confirms Series C round is actually over $650 million
Pivotal filed a Form D last week with the SEC, indicating that last week’s $253 million round was actually closer to $653 million. Where did the extra money come from? Well, existing investors EMC converted $400 million in debt to equity to account for the additional money recorded in the SEC form, according to a Pivotal spokesperson. It’s actually quite interesting that EMC, which… Read More
-
Lending Club shares are crashing after its CEO resigns
Lending Club shares are down more than 25% — shaving off hundreds of millions of dollars off the company’s roughly $2.5 billion market cap — after it announced its CEO would resign following an internal review of $22 million in near-prime loan sales to a single investor. Renaud Laplanche will leave the company after a review of a loan sale that didn’t meet the… Read More
-
CoreOS raises $28M Series B round led by GV
CoreOS, the company behind the container-centric CoreOS Linux distribution and Tectonic container management service, today announced that it has raised a $28 million Series B round led by GV, the fund formerly known as Google Ventures. Other investors include Accel, Fuel Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and the Y Combinator Continuity Fund. In total, the company has… Read More
-
RewardStyle helps influencers make money from social
These days, you can’t swing a bag of cats around without hitting some sort of social influencer. But how do these people make money from their content? RewardStyle, a Dallas-based startup, provides a platform for influencers and bloggers to get paid for all the sales they inspire out of consumers. Though the company has been operating under the radar, it has grown to generate more than… Read More
-
SAP announces new partnership with Apple to expand iOS in the enterprise
SAP announced a broad partnership with Apple today to bring iOS to SAP’s enterprise customer base. The announcement comes almost two years after Apple made a similar deal with IBM. Steve Lucas, president for SAP’s Digital Enterprise Platform says while it’s natural to see similarities between the two deals — two large enterprise companies making a deal with Apple… Read More
-
eBay acquires AI-powered big data processor Expertmaker
eBay announced today that it is acquiring Expertmaker, a Swedish company that specializes in analysis of big data with a machine-learning twist. Read More
-
Engagio launches PlayMaker to turn B2B marketing insights into action items
Engagio, the B2B marketing platform built by Marketo founder Jon Miller, is about a year old and performing well. The company has 36 clients and is operating at $675,000 in recurring annual revenue. But now is no time for the company to rest on its laurels. Today, Engagio is introducing a new product into the mix called PlayMaker. For the past year, Engagio has been offering insights and… Read More
-
Pivotal scores $253 million Series C led by Ford on hefty $2.8 billion valuation
Pivotal has a couple of new friends with big wallets. Today it announced that Ford and Microsoft were joining EMC, VMware and GE as investment partners on a massive $253 million Series C investment with a whopping $2.8 billion valuation. It’s not a coincidence that Pivotal has been working closely with Ford over the last year to help it in its own transformation from a car company to… Read More
-
LiveNinja secures a further $2M to combine live web chat and messaging
With the rise and rise of messaging (I have at least six messaging apps on my phone and counting), tech companies are piling into the space. Many are trying to shoe-horn ‘chat bots’ into behaving like they are capable of customer service. Facebook Messenger, Kik, Twitter, Skype, Telegram, and WhatsApp have all announced such services. But as others have pointed out, we are nowhere… Read More
-
France’s SigFox will expand its dedicated IoT network to 100 U.S. cities
SigFox, the French startup that is building dedicated cellular networks for Internet of Things objects from connected smoke alarms and refrigerators to interactive billboards, traffic systems and factory robots, has announced a big move into the U.S. market. The company said that it would be taking its services into 100 cities, in partnership with unnamed “strategic site… Read More
Message Us