Indian electronics and lifestyle startup Boat raises $100 million from Warburg Pincus

Boat, an electronics and lifestyle startup in India, has raised $100 million in a new financing round that many independent investors termed as the most successful hardware startup story to date in the world's second-largest internet market. An affiliate of Warburg Pincus, a New York-headquarte

GitHub alumni are building Rewatch, a solution for your Zoom fatigue

The rise of distributed teams in response to the coronavirus has led to more video-conferencing meetings for all of us. As offices remain closed, distributed work is forcing companies to figure out a better way than Zoom or Google Hangouts to meet with employees across time zones

Kyte raises $9 million to deliver rental cars to your doorstep

More than two years ago, Ludwig Schoenack, Nikolaus Volk and Francesco Wiedemann looked at the bevy of scooter services, ride-hailing apps, public transit and car-sharing options available in most urban centers in the United States and saw a gap in the mobility market. Consumers who didn’t wa

Divvy raises $165M as the spend management space stays red-hot

Today Divvy, a Utah-based startup that focuses on corporate spend management, announced that it has closed a $165 million round at a $1.6 billion valuation. The company said that the new capital was raised from Hanaco, Schonfeld, PayPal Ventures and Whale Rock, along with a cadre of prior investors

Niantic buys competitive gaming platform Mayhem

Pokémon GO creator Niantic has acquired a small SF gaming startup building a league and tournament organization platform to help gamers create their own communities around popular titles. Mayhem was in Y Combinator’s winter 2018 batch and went on to raise $5.7 million in funding, according

Silicon Valley Bank just made an even bigger push into wealth management

SVB Financial Group agreed today to buy Boston Private Financial Holdings in Boston for $900 million in cash and stock. It’s a big deal for SVB, which has earned a reputation over its 37-year history as a bank that’s friendly to startups, as well as venture and private equity investors.

Looking to decarbonize the metal industry, Bill Gates-backed Boston Metal raises $50 million

Steel production accounts for roughly 8% of the emissions that contribute to global climate change. It is one of the industries that sits at the foundation of the modern economy and is one of the most resistant to decarbonization. As nations around the world race to reduce their environmental footp

Twitter acquires social podcasting app Breaker, team to help build Twitter Spaces

Twitter has acquired social broadcasting app Breaker, the companies announced today via a combination of blog posts and tweets. The deal will see Breaker’s team joining Twitter to help “improve the health of the public conversation” on the service, as well as work on Twitter’

It’s not just you, Slack is struggling this morning

Slack did its best to ease the working world back into their jobs this morning by breaking, ensuring that everyone’s return to the grind would be as chaotic and unproductive as possible. Precisely when the downtime began is not clear, though problems amongst the technewss staff began a littl

Teledyne to acquire FLIR in $8 billion cash and stock deal

Industrial sensor giant Teledyne is set to acquire sensing company FLIR in a deal valued at around $8 billion in a mix of stock and cash, pending approvals with an expected closing date sometime in the middle of this year. While both companies make sensors, aimed primarily at industrial and commerc

Google and Snap in talks to invest in India’s ShareChat

ShareChat, an Indian social network that added Twitter as an investor in 2019, may soon receive the backing of two more American firms. The Bangalore-based startup is in advanced stages of talks to raise money from Google and Snap, as well as several existing investors, including Twitter, three sou

The big question on every startup’s mind for 2021

My big question for 2021, and the one that is on every startup’s mind, is how will a cataclysmic event such as a global pandemic show up in post-pandemic innovation? I think we're in the early innings of seeing what “aha moments” have materialized into companies. And we won&#

Union Square Ventures and Learn Capital file paperwork indicating new funds

As 2020 comes to a long-awaited end, a series of filings indicate that venture capitalists are ending the year with fresh money. According to SEC paperwork, Learn Capital and USV have filed paperwork that shows the firms have raised new, multimillion-dollar funds. If you've been paying attentio

BadVR is using government grants to build a business that’s independent of venture capital

When the Los Angeles-based extended reality data visualization company BadVR first heard that one of its earliest benefactors, Magic Leap, was about to shed 1,000 jobs and was fighting for its life, the young startup was unfazed. Despite the very public ties that BadVR had to Magic Leap, as one of