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Genesis Partners spins out $50 million fund, F2 Capital, to back early-stage startups in Israel
Three members of the senior investing team at Genesis Partners, a major Israeli venture firm, are stepping out with a new, early-stage fund of their own called F2 Capital. For the unfamiliar, Genesis Partners’ portfolio companies have been acquired by the likes of Apple, IBM, Microsoft and Sapiens over the past decade, and have gone public on the Nasdaq exchange in the U.S. as… Read More
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Online real estate service OpenDoor raises $210M Series D despite risky financing model
This afternoon, Norwest Venture Partners announced that it led a massive $210 million Series D investment round in OpenDoor. With the new capital, the startup is looking to expand the usage of its marketplace platform for buying and selling real estate to 10 cities. OpenDoor is unique in that it owns its own inventory of homes. While the predictive analytics the company employs to project… Read More
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Skillz wins two new patents, is now helping brands sponsor e-sports tournaments
Game tech startup Skillz today launched a service that allows brands to easily sponsor and host mobile e-sports tournaments for any game titles that they like, as long as they are already part of the Skillz platform. As we’ve previously reported, Skillz enables developers to turn mobile games into tournament-playable titles without writing a ton of new code. Its technology operates as a… Read More
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Dusk’s new app lets you live stream anonymously
Online anonymity can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can give people a voice when they’d otherwise be afraid to speak up — whether that’s because of fear of government surveillance, discussing a topic that’s known to provoke cyberbullying or because the topic itself is sensitive — like a personal confession or health issue. But anonymity also… Read More
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Amazon has a shiny new startup accelerator to advance conversational AI
Big tech companies have been creating accelerators left and right to evangelize their brands and get developers engaged with APIs and other open-source efforts. Today, Amazon joined the crowd by announcing a new program for startups developing conversational AI. This is Amazon’s first foray into the world of accelerator programs, though its $100 million Alexa Fund has already invested… Read More
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Reddit cracks down on abuse as CEO apologizes for trolling the trolls
Reddit will start issuing warnings, timeouts and permanent bans to its most abusive trolls, but will also limit the content manipulation capabilities of its own CEO after he apologized today for ethical violations that shook the trust of the online community. Last week, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, who goes by the handle Spez, secretly edited users’ comments in the pro-Trump subreddit… Read More
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Jerrick, the company that relaunched Omni, unveils a new community publishing platform
Rick Schwartz has produced some great, successful movies, including The Departed, Black Swan and Gangs of New York. But with Jerrick Media Holdings (founded with former Wall Street executive Jeremy Frommer), he’s shifting his focus to the online world. Schwartz explained the move by saying he’d “noticed that it was harder and harder to get people to go into theaters… Read More
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White House expands platforms for inclusive entrepreneurship
The White House announced today new and expanded plans to improve diversity and inclusion within the startup economy, focused on higher education, investment and entrepreneurship. The diversity commitments made by schools, venture capital firms and tech companies represent a passing of the torch from the Obama administration to the private sector, which has been asked to take on the challenge… Read More
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Hardbound’s app uses visual stories to catch you up on the day’s news and more
Instead of killing time on your phone playing games or browsing Facebook, the recently launched application Hardbound aims to help you fill your spare minutes by learning something new instead. The months-old app introduces its own visual and interactive format for mobile storytelling, allowing you to tap through interesting mini-stories covering science, history, technology, business and… Read More
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Zero is a mobile automation app for email addicts
Email apps are a dime a dozen. There are the regular emails apps that come with our phones, there’s Gmail and Spark and there’s 50 others that all offer just about the same thing. Zero is trying something different. Think of Zero as an AI-enabled email system. It reads your messages as they come in and allows you to do all the regular stuff – move emails into trash, snooze… Read More
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Dubsmash syncs €9 million Series B
Dubsmash, the lip-syncing video app from Berlin that became a surprise social hit last year, has raised Series B funding. According to multiple sources — and now confirmed by the company — Sunstone Capital has led a €9 million (~$9.6m) round with participation from Index Ventures, Balderton Capital, Eniac Venture, and Lowercase Capital. Read More
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Eric Schmidt-backed data science startup Civis Analytics raises $22M
Civis Analytics, a company founded by the chief analytics officer of Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, has raised $22 million in Series A funding. Founder and CEO Dan Wagner told me that after the election, he discovered that many organizations — whether they were in politics, government or business — were dealing with problems similar to the ones he faced during… Read More
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Facebook has cut off Prisma’s Live Video access
Style transfer startup Prisma added support to its iOS app for livestreaming its art filter effects in real-time via Facebook Live earlier this month — but almost immediately the startup’s access to the Live API was cut off by the social media platform giant. Read More
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Knotch has patented its color-based feedback system
Knotch promises marketers a better way to collect user feedback about the effectiveness of their sponsored content. Now it’s announcing that it has received a design patent for its approach. Basically, when a sponsored article uses Knotch, a survey question pops up at the end, which is supposed to help advertisers assess your state of mind after reading the article. The big difference… Read More
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Soracom launches SIM cards and services easing IoT rollout cost
One of the challenges of Internet of Things is the poor availability and high price of mobile data. Twilio announced it was going to have a stab at changing that earlier this year. Today Soracom showed off its solutions to ease the pain of IoT adaptation across the industry. The company’s slightly byzantine pricing plans are optimized for a number of low-bandwidth, high uptime applications. Read More
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Post-App Store developer platform Blackstorm’s first showcase instant games launch on Facebook
In Ernestine Fu’s future, you shouldn’t have to wait more than a few seconds to launch a game or an app to connect with a friend. In fact, a few seconds might even be too long. That’s what prompted the birth of Blackstorm, a development platform that has the tools to build high-fidelity applications — the same you might get from an app in the App Store — in HTML5… Read More
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How a former model decided to launch an app to tackle mental health
Mental health is one of the buzzwords of the moment, especially now Royalty like Prince William and Duchess Katherine have been championing it, along with Kid Cudi, Cara Delevingne and others saying that they would be open to sending their children to counselling. One in five people have suffered from depression, one in two will suffer some other mental disturbance in their lifetimes. If… Read More
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Starburst Ventures closes $200 million debut fund to back space tech startups
A new venture fund called Starburst Ventures has raised a $200 million debut fund to invest in early stage aerospace startups over the next three years. The fund is an extension of the Starburst Accelerator, which was founded in 2012 to help aviation and aerospace tech startups raise seed funding, and score their first big deal with a corporate customer, typically representing $1 million or… Read More
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Mojiworks is a new UK startup building games for iMessage
Mojiworks, new startup from the founders of Wonderland, the UK gaming startup acqui-hired by Zynga back in 2011, is on a mission to turn Apple’s iMessage into a social gaming platform. Read More
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