Startups

As cybersecurity continues to grow in profile amid an increasingly complex and dangerous landscape of malicious activity, a cybersecurity vendor that specializes in “all-in-one” services covering the many aspects of security IT has closed a big round of funding. Acronis has raised $250

Africa is the last frontier for basically anything. Mobile gaming is no exception. For a continent that is home to more than 1 billion millennials and Gen Zers, mobile gaming has never really picked up, despite the continent witnessing rapid economic growth and smartphone adoption. Two issues have

This morning WorkBoard, a software startup that sells software designed to help other companies plan, announced that it has raised a $75 million Series D. Softbank Group led the investment, which saw participation from prior investors including Microsoft’s M12 venture capital arm, a16z, GGV a

The market remains very hot for startups building e-commerce empires by consolidating independent third-party merchants that have gained traction on Amazon’s Marketplace, and in the latest development, Razor Group — a Berlin-based startup buying up promising Amazon sellers and scaling t

"speakable-summary" dir="ltr">When the iconic American power tools company Stanley Black & Decker began looking for ways to improve the pipeline of diverse candidates that the company was reviewing for potential roles, it turned to an Israeli-based startup called Talenya for help. The company wa

Education may well be the most important activity we conduct as a society — and it may also be the hardest space to build a startup in. Selling to school districts and universities is notoriously difficult, but enticing consumers is even harder. Learning takes focus, patience, tenacity and resour

Luis von Ahn, an entrepreneur who has dedicated his career to scaling free education, has probably annoyed you more than once. In fact, you've likely been annoyed by his work dozens and maybe hundreds of times over the years. A decade before he co-founded the whimsical and language-learning app

Duolingo CEO and co-founder Luis von Ahn was tired of the gray and dreary design aesthetic edtech companies used to emulate universities. Instead, he and the company's early team sought inspiration from games like Angry Birds and Clash Royale, looking to build a class that screamed more cartoon

As its meandering route to monetization will demonstrate, Duolingo isn't mission-oriented, it's mission-obsessed. Co-founders Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker never wanted to charge consumers for access to Duolingo content, a purpose imbued throughout the company's culture. For years in

Duolingo has been wildly successful. It has pulled in 500 million total registered learners, 40 million active users, 1.5 million premium subscribers and $190 million in booked revenues in 2020. It has a popular and meme-ified mascot in the form of the owl Duo, a creative and engaging product, and

With Verizon’s long-anticipated sale of its media business now finally in progress — by way of a deal, announced earlier today, with private equity firm Apollo paying $5 billion for Yahoo, AOL and the many various internet brands and services that are part of the operation (including us

Columbus, Ohio-based firm Path Robotics today announced the completion of a $56 million Series B. The round, led by Addition (featuring Drive Capital, Basis Set and Lemnos Lab) brings the robotic welding company's total funding to $71 million. Adding another piece to the broader automated manuf

Canadian fintech giant Wealthsimple has raised a new round of $750 million CAD (~$610 million) at a post-money valuation of $5 billion CAD (~$4 billion). The round was led by Meritech and Greylock, and includes funding from Inovia, Sagard and Redpoint, Two Sigma Ventures, TCV, as well as individual

Hangry, an Indonesian cloud kitchen startup that wants to become a global food and beverage company, has raised a $13 million Series A. The round was led by returning investor Alpha JWC Ventures and included participation from Atlas Pacific Capital, Salt Ventures and Heyokha Brothers. It will be us