Startups

All over the world startups are piling into the space marked “virtual interaction and collaboration”. What if a startup created a sort of “Club Penguin for adults”? Step forward Cosmos Video, which has a virtual venues platform that allows people to work, hang out and socialize toge

Swell Energy, an installer and manager of residential renewable energy, energy efficiency and storage technologies, is raising $450 million to finance the construction of four virtual power plants representing a massive amount of energy storage capacity paired with solar power generation. It’

The stunning debut of the food delivery company DoorDash on the public market this week has plenty of people puzzled. While undeniably fast-growing, the unprofitable delivery company has come under fire numerous times over its employment practices, and its IPO, like that of other gig-economy compan

Gorgias announced today that it has raised $25 million in Series B funding, bringing the startup’s pre-money valuation to $300 million. When the company raised its Series A just over a year ago, CEO Romain Lapeyre (who founded Gorgias with CTO Alex Plugaru) told me that it works with e-commer

AT&T announced yesterday that it’s selling anime streaming service Crunchyroll to Sony’s Funimation for an acquisition price of $1.18 billion. According to the announcement, Crunchyroll has 90 million registered users and 3 million paying subscribers. The service started in 2006 as

With Slack being acquired by Salesforce for $28 billion, the world of collaborative tools for teams is on fire right now. Notion is super hot and last year Frame.io raised $50 million and Microsoft has Fluid. Now, after some months in private beta, JetBrains — which also makes development env

This week Koan, a startup that provides objectives-and-key-results (OKR) and status-tracking software, announced that it has raised an additional $1 million, added a free tier to its service and acquired a design firm with which it has worked. Koan, which raised $3 million in seed funding last Octo

Planet FWD, the climate-friendly food startup founded by Zume co-founder Julia Collins, is today launching its first product, Moonshot Snacks. The climate-friendly snack is carbon neutral, organic, kosher, plant-based, non-GMO and has no sugar added. The crackers come in three flavors: sourdough s

LeafLink is today announcing it raised a $40 million Series C financing round, led by Founders Fund with participation from Thrive Capital, Nosara Capital and Lerer Hippeau. This round of financing brings the total amount raised by the company to more than $90 million. This financing round is Found

Only a few months after announcing its $15 million Series A round, Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity firm Hunters today announced that it has received additional growth funding from Snowflake Ventures for its Open Extended Threat Detection & Response service (XDR). With this, Snowflake’s ventu

Aira is the company behind one of the most exciting wireless power innovations, and now this technology could be headed into vehicles. The wireless power company just announced a strategic investment from Motherson, a Tier 1 global auto parts supplier. Aira’s technology allows companies to bu

Cleo, the London-founded “financial assistant” that takes the form of an app and chatbot and now counts the U.S. as its largest market, has raised $44 million in Series B funding. Leading the round, which I understand actually closed earlier this year, is EQT Ventures. Also participatin

German fintech Solactive, a technology-enabled provider of indices and index solutions to the global financial services industry, has taken a $60.4 million / €50 million minority investment from growth investor Summit Partners. Widely regarded as something of a disruptor in the global indexing in

Productivity software has been getting a major re-examination this year, and human resources platforms — used for hiring, firing, paying and managing employees — have been no exception. Today, one of the startups that’s built what it believes is the next generation of how HR shoul