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AI startup Appier gets $33M Series C from investors, including SoftBank Group, Line Corp. and Naver
Appier, a Taiwanese startup that helps companies harness artificial intelligence to make marketing decisions, announced today that it has raised a $33 million Series C round from an impressive roster of Asian investors. They are SoftBank Group Corp., Line Corp., Naver Corp., EDBI and Hong Kong-based financial services firm AMTD Group. Read More
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Meet eight startups joining MetaProp NYC’s real estate accelerator
For the third year, MetaProp NYC is bringing together a group of startups focused on real estate tech. This time, the companies are tackling issues like green buildings, apartment entry and parking. Most of them are based in New York, but some come from as far away as Singapore. “Our incoming accelerator cohort is indicative of the increasingly fast global growth and demand for… Read More
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Ryan Hoover’s $3M Angel Fund is going by the name Weekend Fund
An SEC filing turned up this morning showing that Product Hunt’s Ryan Hoover is investing out of a $3 million AngelList Angel Fund going by the name Weekend Fund. We previously reported that Hoover was a deal lead through the Angel Funds product — but now we know the size and name of the vehicle. Read More
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FitGenie is applying AI to automate nutrition planning
It may well turn out, as technologists are already suspecting, that AI makes everything better. But plenty of startup founders are still in the experimental phase of figuring out whether — or maybe how much — machine learning can improve an existing app category. Read More
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Tinder Gold, which lets you see who has liked you, launches today in U.S.
As Rafiki once said, “It is time.” Tinder Gold, the dating app’s new premium subscription tier (which includes a feature that lets you see who’s already liked you without any swiping) is finally rolling out to the U.S. Tinder Gold and Likes You were originally tested in Argentina, Australia, Canada and Mexico at the end of June. Today, however, the the feature rolls out… Read More
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Cannabis website Herb raises $4.1M
We get a lot of weed-related pitches at TechCrunch, but most of them don’t come with the pedigree of Herb‘s investors. Herb is announcing today that it has raised $4.1 million in seed funding led by Lerer Hippeau Ventures, with participation from Slow Ventures, Buddy Media co-founder Michael Lazerow, Bullpen Capital, Shiva Rajarama, Liquid 2 Ventures (the firm led by football… Read More
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Michael Jordan funds mercenary dev hub Gigster’s $20M enterprise pivot
Gigster is shifting from letting anyone outsource full-stack app development to building next-gen tech projects for big companies. If an enterprise needs machine learning and vision, data visualization, blockchain, React or Swift work done and doesn’t want to hire full-time employees, Gigster assembles a squad of freelancers and guarantees the work at a fixed price. Read More
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BunkerEx is an online marketplace for shipping companies that need to buy fuel
BunkerEx is a newly-funded startup out of London that is building an online marketplace to change the way shipping companies buy fuel, or ‘bunkers,’ to use the correct industry term. Read More
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Bunch wants to be ‘Google Analytics for company culture’
Bunch, a newly-launched startup operating out of Berlin, is aiming to be something akin to a “Google Analytics for company culture”. It offers a SaaS to let companies and company teams quantify internal company culture, and then use this data as the basis to screen job candidates to help ensure that they will also be a good fit. Read More
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Western Digital acquires cloud services company Upthere
Western Digital has today announced that it purchased Upthere for an undisclosed amount. Upthere had previously raised $77 million from an impressive list of investors, with KPCB and Western Digital Ventures leading the round. Upthere wants you to think of its service as the canonical location where your data lives. It’s available for OS X/MacOS, Windows, Android and iOS. Read More
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Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan welcome their second daughter, August, into the world
Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan have welcomed their second daughter into the world, and her name is August. Before you ask, it’s unclear if she was named August because she was born in August. (But I highly doubt it.) In usual Zuck fashion, the Facebook CEO and founder posted the announcement to Facebook along with a letter from him and his wife to the new baby girl. Here’s… Read More
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Leela Kids opens up the world of podcasts to children
Leela Kids is a very straightforward app that nonetheless might prevent some parents from going insane. It curates podcasts by subject matter for age ranges from three to 15 years old and packages them in a kid-friendly interface. Leela Kids gives caretakers peace of mind that whatever their charges are listening to is age-appropriate and reasonably edifying. In fact, it recently hit the top… Read More
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Skidos offers an SDK to turn mobile games into ‘learning apps’
Skidos, an edtech startup based in Copenhagen after relocating its HQ from New Delhi, offers an SDK to help games developers turn casual games into “learning apps”. Read More
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Athelas launches a new type of blood testing device for the home
Athelas is launching a low-cost, blood diagnostics device today made for testing certain diseases like the flu, bacterial infections and cancer in the comfort of your home. Tanay Tandon founded the startup in 2014 at the tender age of 17 to develop a smartphone device that could detect malaria through blood samples. That idea proved difficult but the idea of ease and mobility stuck with… Read More
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Y Combinator takes machine intelligence startups to school and learns a thing or two
Machine intelligence startups are the black sheep of the startup world. The new kids on the block are challenging investors to do their technical homework and differentiate themselves in intentional ways. Y Combinator joined a growing list of investors offering exclusive services to these companies in a specialized AI track for its latest S17 batch of startups. In the competitive world of… Read More
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The negative instinct
I’ve seen, of late, a tendency for young, intelligent men (and sometimes women, although this is primarily a male phenomenon) to fight back against the inequity of the startup ecosystem by joining political movements that are far right of Libertarianism. This tendency, one borne out of helplessness and frustration, is also defined by a certain mindset: that the world owes them success. To… Read More
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Wattpad moves into video with personal storytelling app, Raccoon
Wattpad, the social publishing platform behind apps for sharing original stories and chat fiction, is today venturing into video with the launch of a new app called Raccoon. Unlike its predecessors, Raccoon will focus on non-fiction video-based storytelling, with the goal of connecting people who want to create and watch stories that either entertain or inspire. While Raccoon still fits… Read More
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Polygram detects facial reactions to shared photos
What if you could see if your Instagrams made people happy, surprised or disgusted? That’s just one of the innovative features of new photo-sharing social network Polygram. Using facial detection, Polygram gives you analytics about the emotional reactions people have to the photos you post. Read More
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