Kodiak Robotics’ founder says tight focus on autonomous trucks is working
Kodiak Robotics is one of the last private autonomous vehicle companies focused on trucking that is still standing. Nearly all the rest have been wooed by the public marketplace and the capital it can provide. But co-founder and CEO Don Burnette says the three-year-old company’s strategy of s
Growth roundup: Investing in community, targeting developers, new marketer recs
“The best thing a startup can do, and I'm seeing it happen more and more, is investing in community early on,” growth marketing expert Max van den Ingh of Unmuted tells us. “When I was leading growth at MisterGreen, we created a community for the first thousand Tesla Model 3 o
Calendly CEO Tope Awotona is joining us at Disrupt 2021
It all seems so simple. Instead of the dreaded back-and-forth on email, what if there was a solution that helped two parties (or multiple parties) schedule a call or a hangout?
Calendly was born out of that question. Today, the company is worth more than $3 billion, according to reports, and has mo
The best way to grow your tech career? Treat it like an app
Software developers and engineers have rarely been in higher demand. Organizations' need for technical talent is skyrocketing, but the supply is quite limited. As a result, software professionals have the luxury of being very choosy about where they work and usually command big salaries.
In 202
A Tesla Megapack caught fire at the Victorian Big Battery facility in Australia
A 13-tonne Tesla Megapack caught fire on Friday morning at a battery storage facility in south-east Australia. The blaze occurred during testing at between 10 and 10.15am local time, according to Victorian Big Battery. The regional fire service said a specialist fire crew had been dispatched to the
Elon Musk calls Apple’s App Store fees ‘a de facto global tax on the Internet’
Elon Musk is siding with Epic Games in the App Store monopoly case, with the Tesla CEO firing off a tweet Friday morning that called Apple’s Store fees “a de facto global tax on the Internet,” also adding that “Epic is right.”
Epic Games legal battle with Apple is sure
Design expert Scott Tong outlines 4 concepts founders should consider when designing products
In the last decade, high-quality design has become a necessity in the software space. Great design is a commodity, not a luxury, and yet, designing beautiful products and finding great designers continues to be a struggle for many entrepreneurs.
At Early Stage 2021, design expert Scott Tong walked
White-label SaaS shipping startup Outvio closes $3M round led by Change Ventures
Outvio, an Estonian startup that provides a white-label SaaS fulfillment solution for medium-sized and large online retailers in Spain and Estonia, has closed a $3 million early-stage financing round led by Change Ventures.
Also participating were TMT Investments (London), Fresco Capital (San Franc
Gillmor Gang: Social climbing
Fear is back with the deadly combination of pandemic politics and a vicious variant. The good news is that if enough people took the shots we could cut the damage to something manageable. The other good news is progress on the twin issues of Trump and social media. In both cases some semblance of
EU hits Amazon with record-breaking $887M GDPR fine over data misuse
Luxembourg's National Commission for Data Protection (CNPD) has hit Amazon with a record-breaking €746 million ($887 million) GDPR fine over the way it uses customer data for targeted advertising purposes.
Amazon disclosed the ruling in an SEC filing on Friday in which it slammed the decision
Chilean fintech Xepelin secures $230M in debt and equity from Kaszek, high-profile angels
Chilean startup Xepelin, which has created a financial services platform for SMEs in Latin America, has secured $30 million in equity and $200 million in credit facilities.
LatAm venture fund Kaszek Ventures led the equity portion of the financing, which also included participation from partners of
Cheltenham's GCHQ to get a massive, cyber-oriented tech startup campus right next door
Since U.K. spying headquarters GCHQ was established in Cheltenham in the 1950s, the city has attracted large firms like IBM, Raytheon, Microsoft and BAE Systems to the region, and startups like Truststamp, Bamboo Technologies, Ripjar, Hub8 and CYNAM have emerged from the city.
All of these firms dr
Platform as a service startup Porter aims to become go-to for deploying, managing cloud-based apps
By the time Porter co-founders Trevor Shim, Alexander Belanger and Justin Rhee decided to build a company around DevOps, the pair were well versed in doing remote development on Kubernetes. And like other users, they were consistently getting burnt by the technology.
They realized that for all of t
Gopuff confirms new $1B cash injection at a $15B valuation to expand its instant grocery delivery service
"speakable-summary" dir="ltr">Gopuff, the startup that’s helped kickstart a new category of food delivery in the U.S. — “instant” delivery of essential groceries and other home goods for a flat fee of $1.95, 24 hours a day — has closed a huge tranche of funding to help