Startups

Airbnb filed to go public today, bringing the well-known unicorn one step closer to being a public company. The financial results show a company on the rebound, but smaller than it was. Its more granular financial results also make clear how hard the pandemic was on the travel-reliant unicorn. Rega

Many consumers might think Noom or Weight Watchers are industry leaders with their nonstop commercials, but neither is the fastest-growing weight management program. Over the past year, nutrition app Lifesum has acquired users at nearly twice the rate of both Noom and Weight Watchers, according to

Arrikto, a startup that wants to speed up the machine learning development lifecycle by allowing engineers and data scientists to treat data like code, is coming out of stealth today and announcing a $10 mlion Series A round. The round was led by Unusual Ventures, with Unusual’s John Vrionis

Four years ago, shared e-scooters didn't exist. Today, they're on track to surpass half a billion rides globally by 2021, far outpacing early growth in the carbon-heavy ride-hailing industry founded by Uber in 2009. That's a dramatic shift in urban transportation by any measure, and it

Squarespace is adding a new monetization option for websites built on the platform: Member Areas, where businesses can charge for access to exclusive content. Chief Product Officer Paul Gubbay said that particularly in the midst of the pandemic, businesses on Squarespace “want to experiment w

Federal regulators have approved Mastercard's acquisition of Salt Lake City-based startup Finicity, which provides open-banking APIs. The deal is expected to go for $825 million. “We were notified that the Department of Justice completed its review of our planned acquisition of Finicity and h

The coronavirus has erased a large chunk of college's value proposition: the on-campus experience. Campuses are closed, sports have been paused and, understandably, students don't want to pay the same tuition for a fraction of the services. As a result, enrollment is down across the country

For years, founders and investors in China had little interest in open-source software because it did not seem like the most viable business model. Zilliz‘s latest financing round shows that attitude is changing. The three-year-old Chinese startup, which builds open-source software for proces

For the past three years, UpCodes and its founders have been entangled in a copyright lawsuit filed by the International Code Council (ICC). Though both focus on the building industry (specifically, the codes architects and builders need to follow), the lawsuit deals with an issue that has wider ra

Organizations today are sitting on mountains of data that they amass and use in their own businesses, but many are also looking to share those troves with other parties to expand their prospects — a model that comes with challenges (privacy and data protection being two key ones); and, these

Walmart announced today it will sell most of its shares in Seiyu, the Japanese supermarket chain it acquired 12 years ago, to KKR and Rakuten. The deal values Seiyu at about $1.6 billion and means Walmart will almost completely exit its operations in Japan. Under the agreement, investment firm KKR

Editor's note: Get this free weekly recap of technewss news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7 a.m. PT). Subscribe here. DoorDash has become the go-to delivery choice for millions of people cooped up during the pandemic this year. Now it has filed an S-1, revealing i

NextView Ventures, a Boston-based venture capital fund, has raised an $89.6 million fund, according to SEC filings. The firm's fourth fund, its largest to date, is oversubscribed, with early documents indicating a $70 million goal. The NextView Ventures team did not immediately respond to reque

One of my favorite series of Monty Python sketches is built around the concept of surprise: Chapman: I didn’t expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition. [JARRING CHORD] [Three cardinals burst in] Cardinal Ximénez: NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! I was reminded of this t