Startups

Better.com CEO Vishal Garg has acknowledged to employees that he “personally guaranteed”  $750 million in post-closing convertible notes that would be provided to the online mortgage lender should it still go public under the original SPAC agreement, according to an email seen by technewss. L

Inflection AI, the machine learning startup headed by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and founding DeepMind member Mustafa Suleyman, has secured $225 million in equity financing, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The source of the capital isn’t yet clear

The jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) approach provides a framework for defining, categorizing, capturing and organizing all your customers’ needs. It teaches us to think about users’ needs and develop a product to meet those needs. The framework also lets us communicate with the user through the

With Elon Musk's recent interest in Twitter, Facebook's growth flattening and TikTok's meteoric rise, it feels like the world of social media is back into some kind of inflection point period. Consumers seem hungry to try out new platforms again, and entrepreneurs are delivering. Last y

Swiggy has amassed millions of users in India, helping them order food and grocery online in the country. The seven-year-old startup, India’s most valued food tech, is now looking to reach those who go out to eat. The Bengaluru-headquartered startup said on Friday it has reached a definitive

As wind energy gains ground in the U.S., SkySpecs is using drones and AI to detect future equipment failures before they grind those giant turbine blades to a halt. The company, which works with wind farms to monitor the health of turbine blades from above, has locked down a fresh $80 million Se

To get a roundup of technewss's biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PT, subscribe here. It's Thursday, May 12, so Happy Friday Eve. Congrats to the “GoogleCrunch” team, which wrote something like 28 stories yesterday to cover Google I/O. You c

Gusto, an HR technology unicorn worth nearly $10 billion, has raised an extension to its 2021-era Series E funding round. That funding event included $175 million in primary capital, a tranche of secondary shares and a tender offer. EquityZen first noted the new capital raise from Gusto based on it

Grocery delivery unicorn Instacart filed privately to go public yesterday, a long-awaited event for the well-known private company. During its startup days, Instacart raised huge amounts of capital and grew rapidly. When the pandemic arrived, Instacart’s business turbocharged as demand for

In 2021, more than $329.5 billion was invested in startups across all stages, per Crunchbase. And a significant majority of that funding was spent on only one aspect: Growth. I have worked in a wide spectrum of growth roles, ranging from a startup with Series A funding to the 30,000-employee Uber.

I’m an absolute sucker for a well-designed pitch deck, and as an animal lover, it’s hard not to immediately fall in love with that adorable dog on the cover slide. Call me ludicrously biased, but first impressions count, and so I picked this deck in part so I would have an excuse to lo

Desktop 3D printing firms MakerBot and Ultimaker this morning announced plans to merge. The new single company will be backed by NPM Capital and MakerBot-owner Stratasys and co-led by existing CEOs Nadav Goshen and Ju?rgen von Hollen. Existing offices will also be maintained in both Brooklyn and T

As Snapchat’s app continues to grow, the company is turning to the open source community to help further improve its technology infrastructure. This morning, Snap announced it’s acquiring Toronto-based KeyDB, the developer of an open source, high-performance database, for an undisclosed

For a time, Kubernetes, the open source container management platform, was as hot as it comes, but lately it has settled into a more mainstream cadence of a maturing technology. As more companies adopt containerization and micro services, it requires more sophisticated tooling to manage a system wi