Utopia Labs is building an operating system for DAOs

Decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, are all the rage at the moment. We're seeing explosive growth in this sector as people experiment with building companies on top of tokens and smart contracts. And where new organization types bloom, so does the need for infrastructure. Utopia La

GM’s US factories will switch to renewable energy five years ahead of schedule

Earlier this year, GM announced plans to go green by 2035 with the vehicles it produces and by 2030 with how it produces them. Now, the company has announced that it will be early on the “how” part, using 100 percent renewable energy across its US operations by 2025 — five years ahead

Orchest raises $3.5M to provide a simpler way to build data pipelines

Orchest co-founder and CEO Rick Lamers calls himself, his co-founder Yannick Perrenet and his team “a bunch of data nerds” that love making data tools. In this case the company is building an open source integrated development environment tool for data scientists so they can develop, iterate an

All Day Kitchens wants to expand every independent restaurant's delivery network

The pandemic ushered in the popularity of shared workspaces, known as cloud kitchens or ghost kitchens, for restaurants to cook meals exclusively for delivery. But for small, independent restaurants that couldn't afford the upfront costs for expansion, Uber Eats alums Ken Chong and Matt Sawchuk

LeadIQ’s rapid growth snags venture attention as sales software market stays hot

This morning LeadIQ, a startup working in the sales software market, announced that it has closed a $30 million Series B led by Cathay Innovation. Other investors in the transaction include Fresco Capital, Strong Ventures and Eight Road Ventures. LeadIQ frames its product from the perspective of mi

Battery chemistry company Sila’s founder Gene Berdichevsky on the science of scaling up

Before Gene Berdichevsky became the co-founder and CEO of battery chemistry company Sila Nano, he was the seventh employee at Tesla Motors. As principal engineer on the Roadster battery, Berdichevsky was one of the first people crazy enough to experiment with shoving a lithium-ion battery pack into

PSPDFkit raises $116M, its first outside money; now nearly 1B people use apps powered by its collaboration, signing and markup tools

An under-the-radar, bootstrapped startup from Vienna, Austria — a hit with developers for technology that underpins user experience for some of the world’s most popular apps — is doubling down on momentum and announcing its first outside investment, in the form of a large growth r

FCC proposes new rules to combat SIM swapping scams

SIM swapping scams have been on the rise these past couple of years, and since most online services these days are tied to people’s phone numbers, the technique has the potential to ruin victims’ lives. Now, the Federal Communications Commission is seeking to create new rules that would

SquadPal is a social app to help remote working teams gel

The future of office work, post-COVID-19, is driving plenty of startup activity. Not just around core business needs like comms (Zoom, Slack et al.) — but entrepreneurs are also competing to come up with the perfect tool to recreate the social serendipity of office life in order to make dispe

Twitter ban in Nigeria to be lifted if platform sets up a local office and pays taxes, president says

Nigeria President Muhammadu Buhari announced on Friday that the current ban on Twitter would be lifted, but only if the social media giant met certain conditions. The president disclosed this during his televised broadcast to Nigerians on the country’s 61st Independence Day anniversary.

SoftBank-backed Oyo files for $1.16 billion IPO

Oyo is ready to explore the public markets. The eight-year-old Indian budget hotel giant has filed the paperwork (PDF) with the local market regulator for an initial public offering, in which it is seeking to raise about $1.16 billion. The Gurgaon-headquartered startup — which offers an oper

And that’s that, as the Zoom deal to buy Five9 is called off

Talk about a roller coaster ride. Zoom, the video conferencing company that became everyone’s primary means of communication around work during the pandemic, will no longer be acquiring Five9, a maker of cloud-based customer service software. Though the all-stock deal, announced in July, was

Foxconn will build EVs for Lordstown Motors and Fisker at Ohio plant

Foxconn will build electric vehicles for Lordstown Motors as well as its other partner Fisker Inc. at a former GM factory in Ohio, under an agreement announced Thursday. Lordstown Motors, the beleaguered electric vehicle company that became publicly traded via a merger with a special purpose acqui

What you should know about working with corporate venture investment committees

With global corporate-venture-capital-backed (CVC) funding reaching $79 billion across 2,099 deals in the first half of 2021, according to CB Insights, the chances are high that startups will find great opportunities with this growing investor set. Entrepreneurs, however, are likely to discover tha